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michaellytle.net

Parkour
(pronounced "par-core")

What is Parkour ? Parkour is the "spartipline" (sport+art+discipline) of fluidly moving through your environment with the use of vaults to overcome obstacles.  There are two types of Parkour.  Traditional Parkour and Free Style Parkour a.k.a. Freerunning
In Traditional Parkour, which is also known as "functional parkour", you attempt to get from point A to point B as quickly and efficiently as possible.
In Free Style Parkour/FreeRunning acrobatics are incorporated into and added to the traditional vaults.  The focus of Free Running is style and demonstration.

I became a traucer/freerunner in 2005 after seeing a David Belle video. I was fascinated, primarily because I had never seen or heard of Parkour and immediately saw it as the definition of what I had been doing all of my life.  When I was in 1st grade I along with a few friends learned how to do backflips on the playground.  By fourth grade we were flipping off of the six foot tall, baseball field fence. Parkour was now a reason, even in my twenty somethings, to start treating my neighborhood and the world like a playground.  After all, why don't they make playgrounds for adults anyway? 

The very day that I saw that first David Belle and then Sabastian Foucan video, Jimmy Hyslope and I went out and started doing PK.  The following videos include footage from that day and beyond.  Some of the clips are of me practicing vaults and flips in my backyard.  Much of the footage is of my first year of Parkour, a year in which I found a Parkour "meet-up" group and about three of us formed Texas Parkour. Each weekend we would meet in Austin or San Antonio to freerun and once a month we would go to a new city.  A year after Texas Parkour was originally formed we began having 30-40 free runners show up every weekend for jam sessions and had become the subject of several documentaries and news reports.











** "Parkour is not flips." I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say this.  If you look at one of my youtube videos we are at a gym jam were we had a front flip competition to see who could cover the most distance with a front flip.  Almost every comment on that video is, "Parkour is not flips."  I have two things to say to that: first, telling me that is like telling an artist he can't use color in his art.  Secondly, I find that usually those who make that statement can't even do flips! If they could they would use them.  So to reiterate, read the definition of Parkour and read that art is part at its core.  Parkour is an expression of movement and hey, its just plain fun.  The one who wants to put rules on fun is...well, not very fun.



****About these videos. Wow do they look amateur-ish! Not just the edit but a lot of the Parkour itself.  But alas, it is all the footage I can find right now and I had to get something up here in order to continue my goals of chronicling michaellytle. So thanks for enjoying!
--Michael











©1994-2012 Michael Lytle