How to be a Superhero

Like most folks, Salil Maniktahla discovered parkour on YouTube.

“This guy’s in an office, looking out the window at traffic below. There’s no way he’s gonna get to where he wants to go in a car. So he heads to the roof of his building, takes his shirt off, and starts jumping from building to building. I remember thinking, ‘That’s not special effects. He’s really doing that.’”

Maniktahla was instantly hooked on the burgeoning new sport called parkour, where practitioners run and move over, under, through, and around whatever obstacles are in their path. Practitioners, called traceurs, climb walls, leap from building to building, vault over obstacles, land massive drops—and they do it all with grace. It’s the art of forward movement.

Parkour has grown from an internet sensation to an organized sport. Thanks to a wave of parkour-specific gyms, a growing interest in parkour competitions, and a new reality show, parkour is ready for its close-up.

Learning how to play Parkour was inspired by the French exercise guru Georges Herbert, who blended functional fitness with a sense of morality to create the Natural Method, a practical approach to fitness that re-taught very basic skills—climbing, running, swimming—that Herbert saw disappearing from society in the early 20th century. At its heart, parkour has the same sense of functionality. The discipline is designed to get the practitioner from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible.

In theory, parkour is meant to prepare you for extreme situations, like being chased or escaping from a burning building. The discipline has become increasingly flashy with stunning acrobatics performed on the streets, but at its core, parkour is still as functional as it is artistic. And it’s also a helluva lot of fun.

“Going to the gym was always so onerous to me,” Salil Maniktahla says. “Until I found parkour, I had no idea you could actually play and get in shape. Parkour has completely revolutionized how I approach fitness.”

Maniktahla founded D.C.’s Rock Creek Parkour, which now has over 400 members. Maniktahla is 27 pounds lighter, and the proud owner of a brand new parkour-specific gym, Urban Evolution, in Alexandria, Va. Six similar gyms have opened in the past two years.

Founded in 2006, Primal Fitness, also in Washington D.C., was the first parkour gym in the world and has helped turn D.C. into one of the premier cities for parkour in the country, paving the way for similar gyms. “There is a lot more correct information out there now than even just a couple of years ago,” says Travis Graves, lead trainer of Primal Fitness. “We want to give people the resources they need to practice safely, instead of just jumping off the highest thing they can find…like I did.”

That looks cool, but can you make a living? There’s a scene in a new reality show where Travis Graves swings, leaps, and slides his way through a jungle gym maze. The TV show is called Jump City Seattle, and it may just be a glimpse into the future of parkour as an organized sport.

Jump City Seattle premiered last February on the G4 network, a cable channel geared towards gamers. The show follows four teams of professional traceurs from all over the country as they move through the rooftops, warehouses, and back alleys of Seattle, competing for the Pro Parkour Championship trophy.

Graves competed in the reality show as a member of the Tribe, the first pro parkour team in the U.S. The Tribe was originally a loosely organized group of traceurs from various corners of the country who got together to provide contacts and resources for budding traceurs itching for knowledge and help. Eventually, the Tribe evolved into a performance group that made traceurs available for commercials, Hollywood stunt work, corporate performances, and the rare parkour competition. In the past several years, members of the Tribe have landed gigs on TV shows like Chuck, starred in commercials for everything from K-Swiss shoes to Nokia phones, and put on demonstrations at a variety of venues, from the Charlotte City Center to the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon.

“We couldn’t afford to keep paying for our AmericanParkour.com website because of how large it had grown, so we started taking a few gigs, commercials and performances, so that we could keep doing what we loved,” explains Paul Mederos, a Virginia-based traceur and one of the Tribe’s founding members.

The performances culminated with Jump City Seattle, a TV show that members of the Tribe spent three years developing.

“This reality show is a way we can bring parkour to a larger audience,” Graves says.

MTV produced a similar show just a couple of years ago, called The Ultimate Parkour Challenge, which  received mixed reviews within the parkour community because it mostly depicted parkour as a competition. Traceurs train together often and organize massive “jams” that bring athletes from entire regions together, but actual organized competitions are rare. In fact, pitting one traceur against the other is almost blasphemous to many parkour enthusiasts, most of whom don’t even consider parkour a sport.

“I’d say it’s more of a discipline than a sport. More like martial arts,” Salil Maniktahla says. “But parkour is moving toward becoming a sport. In America, you gotta get on TV, and for that, you’ve gotta have conflict.”

Graves admits that competition is often frowned upon in the parkour community and insists that Jump City Seattle depicts a loose competition, where traceurs basically compete for points and pride. But it’s a competition nonetheless.

“Most of us don’t like the notion of competition, but some think it’s a necessary evil to get the sport in front of a larger audience,” says Graves.

Founding Tribe member Paul Mederos thinks it’s inevitable that parkour becomes an organized sport. “If it’s done properly, turning parkour into an official sport will be awesome. I can imagine schools teaching it in gym to kids, groups getting together to enjoy the outdoors, and official challenges where you can test your skills against a course.”

See videos of The Tribe in action.

Master Parkour Basics “The stuff you see on YouTube is flashy, but most parkour movements are useful like vaulting, climbing, and jumping, things you did when you were a kid,“ says Travis Graves, who oversees the parkour program at Primal Fitness. “You’re learning to play again.” Here are three basic movements taught in beginning parkour classes across the country.

• Vault – Approach a hand rail or low wall slowly. Place both hands on the top of the rail slightly to the right of your body. Brace your weight on your hands, bringing your inside foot to the top of the rail for support, and step through with your outside foot.
• Precision jumps – In precision jumps, you’re jumping from one small obstacle to another. On a sidewalk, practice jumping from one crack to the next. Start by jumping and landing on one foot, like an exaggerated stride. Land on the balls of your feet, controlling your momentum and maintaining balance as you land. As you progress, look for low-lying obstacles like benches that you can link together.
• Rolling – This is a sideways roll, where you’re creating a diagonal line of contact across your back, leading with your right shoulder and moving to your left hip. Imagine you just hit the ground after a jump. Your hands hit first, then ride the contact with the ground through your right arm, rolling with it to dissipate the energy. Then your right shoulder hits, then your back, then your left hip. Keep your feet tucked, so you’re almost forming a ball with your body, and try to pop up at the end of the roll from the momentum and keep running.

Get into Parkour Shape It takes a bit of physical prowess to scale a wall or jump from a dumpster and roll with grace. Work these three exercises into your routine to prep for parkour.

• Plyometric Push-Ups – Assume the standard push-up position. Lower your body to the ground. With explosive force, push off  the ground so your hands leave the floor. If you can, try to clap your hands mid-air.
• Calf Raises – In parkour, the ankles suffer from serious impact. Strengthen the muscles around your ankles to stave off serious injury. Stand on a step with your heels hanging in mid-air. Rise onto your toes, hold for two seconds, then lower to the starting position.
• Squat Hops – Beginning at the bottom of a set of stairs, stand with your feet shoulder-width apart. Drop into a full squat, then jump, landing on the first step ahead of you. Continue this pattern up the stairs.

Is it Parkour or Free Running? Free running is almost identical to parkour, except free runners employ acrobatics, flips, and spins when they’re navigating obstacles. While parkour is often defined by the efficiency of movement, free running is more often seen as a form of expression. As each discipline evolves, the line between parkour and free running grows thinner.

Parkour Here Parkour is an urban-based discipline designed to be adaptable to any streetscape, so in theory, you can practice parkour just about anywhere. But there’s been a movement in recent years to build parkour-specific parks with features designed specifically for practicing jumps, vaults, landings, and wall runs. Parks are rumored to be in the works in Texas and Seattle, and Kyle Brannon, a 19-year-old college student living west of Atlanta, is working diligently to build the first parkour-specific park in the Southeast. Brannon has managed to navigate the red tape of county politics and is now seeking funds to build the park, which will be located in Deer Lick Park in Douglasville. The park will have a range of modular obstacles like balance beams, vault boxes, and scaffold bars.

“It’s going to replicate the urban environment while having the ability to be rearranged for any sort of maneuver,” Brannon says.

Meanwhile, D.C. has emerged as the hub of parkour on the East Coast, especially Gateway Park and Meridian Hill. And virtually all college campuses are ideal for parkour, says Mederos. “Anywhere you can find an abundance of railings, walls, ramps, and stairs makes for a good training spot, and colleges are jam-packed.”

When Zombies Attack Survive Alexandria is a massive game of zombie tag staged by Salil Maniktahla where a large pool of runners move from one station to the next. At each station, you get your hand stamped. Meanwhile, a smaller pool of “zombies” are chasing you down. If you get tagged by a zombie, you become a zombie yourself.

Maniktahla expected 200 runners for the inaugural Survive Alexandria in 2010. He wound up with over 1,000 participants, including a large number of traceurs itching to test their skills in a chase scenario.

“I underestimated the popularity of zombies in American culture,” Maniktahla says. “It was sheer mayhem on the streets of Alexandria.”

Look for the 2011 edition of Survive Alexandria in August. urbanevo.com