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