Pick the Soft Concrete

When I have heard of something then you can be sure that whatever it is has truly arrived.  If I actually engage in it then you know it has also departed.  I have been vaguely aware of parkour for a few years now but it has recently been brought directly before my eyes.

From what I've heard parkour was developed from French military obstacle course training and seems to involve running, jumping and vaulting over things that a few minutes thought would enable you to walk around all of which must be quite difficult to do while simultaneously waving a white flag.

Parkour has really caught on with the sort of people who delight in making life difficult for themselves.  Exponents of parkour will run up the sides of buildings, hurl themselves through narrow openings and slide under fences all to arrive breathless at a destination you or I would get to by catching a bus always assuming we wanted to go there at all.  To be fair there is a certain amount of dramatic presence achieved by suddenly turning up on top of a fence near your destination, rolling athletically off the top, skidding in the patch of urine left by last night's drunks and having your head bounce rhythmically off the concrete.  And when that does happen at least you're near a busstop so you can take yourself to hospital.

According to wikipedia people who partake in parkour are called traceurs.  Apparently in a recent poll this name beat "runny, jumpy, rolly people" into second place.  It is by and large a sport for the young.  Not the young at heart, just the actual young.  A fair bit of parkour involves bouncing off concrete.  Since concrete doesn't have a heck of a lot of give in it it is preferable if the human body in question does.  And thus a reasonably young one is best.  By the time you get to my age the body tends to be rivalling concrete for inflexibility which would make attempting to bounce of it a once only affair.  Most traceurs also tend to be male.  This is for the rather obvious reason that throwing yourself at concrete is not something a sensible person does, therefore females are rather thin on the ground.

My introduction to parkour came courtesy of the son of friends of mine.  He (his name is Eaden) does parkour and now he was taking part in a competition.  A large room in what looks like a warehouse/factory/drug lab had been filled with random obstacles and the parkour competitors were wound up and pushed roughly towards the middle.  Points were awarded for technical skill, rhythmic flow, excitement factor and not splattering yourself over the concrete floor.

Each routine took twenty seconds and in that time the contestants had impress the crap out of the judges, preferably without getting themselves killed.  Eaden didn't win, sadly, but it was his first competition and at fifteen he still has several more years of competing before bone brittleness makes it suicidal.  Eaden's parents and I watched with that combination of awe and envy typical of middle aged people watching youngsters do things that they can no longer even contemplate much less achieve.  Eaden jumped, tumbled, rolled and, on impact with concrete, managed to bounce rather than splat.  All in all he was pretty damned impressive.