Cody Predum, a University freshman, sprints across the entryway to Johnson Hall before leaping over the building ledge and dropping ten feet to the ground. He rolls to his feet, mud coating his pant leg.
“It usually doesn’t go how you expect … and that’s fun,” he said.
Predum is Parkouring, also known as PK, a sport where gymnastics and martial arts blend in continuous movement. Participants approach everyday obstacles, such as stairs, rails and walls as opportunities to create more direct paths by jumping or climbing over them.
The purpose of Parkour is to defy the structural boundaries created by urban settings by using them in unconventional and more efficient ways.
“We live in such an industrial urban environment. Parkour is a way to flow through your environment,” said Nathan Andrus-Hughes, a freshman who practices Parkour around campus for the exercise, stress release and also as a follower of the philosophy behind the sport.
“It’s pushing the limits of humanity,” he said. “I think we’re limited and PK helps us push these limits.”
Part of the philosophy behind Parkour is that the structural obstacles people come across everyday, such as walls or fences, represent larger life challenges, and finding alternative paths represents the search for general solutions to life’s problems.
Parkour, which comes from the French word “parcours,” meaning path or course, was solidified by David Belle in the late 1980s. As a teenager, Belle’s father taught him a training exercise called the “Natural Method of Physical Culture,” which he learned while serving in the French army in Vietnam.
While the idea of jumping off ledges and climbing walls appears dangerous, none of the Parkourers spoken with for this story reported any injuries beyond sprains, scratches and shin splints. Belle, who has jumped from a two-story ship onto a platform, has also never been reported seriously injured.
Training for Parkour involves running and practicing jumps, drops and rolls. Parkour itself tones participants’ bodies and weight lifting is not usually coupled with the sport.
Recently, the sport’s popularity has grown outside of France, finding its way into North American popular culture, such as in video games (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider Legend), music videos (Madonna’s “Jump” video) and on TV (“CSI: NY”).
Predum is concerned the sport will be considered counter-cultural and prohibited in areas, as skateboarding has been in the past.
“I would like people to say Parkour is a creative, artistic way of doing things,” he said.
Riley Clawson, a University freshman who learned about the sport after a friend e-mailed him a video of Belle, hopes popular culture will embrace the sport, not destroy it.
“I surely hope that this art will be taken seriously, but I can’t predict the flow of culture. If a certain group wants to adopt Parkour as their own, I have no say in how it develops, but I sincerely hope they will preserve the beauty of the art,” he said.
Clawson said he views Parkour as a relative of karate and refers to it as the French art of running away, which is how it’s portrayed in Belle’s film “Banlieue 13,” or the U.S. version, “District B13,” released last June.
“We have the infamous ‘fight or flight’ instinct, and there is training for fight, but Parkour seems to be the training for flight,” he said.
Parkour is also often associated with free running, which Belle’s childhood friend, Sébastien Foucan, developed. Free running incorporates more aesthetic and non-functional movements, such as flips. Although flipping can be considered Parkour only if the flip is being used efficiently to change the path of motion, Predum said.
Participants of Parkour learn to look at their environments with new eyes. The urban restriction of architecture is lost; ledges no longer hold people back, but can propel people.
“Practice is somewhat integrated into daily routine. Instead of taking the stairs up, I may go over a wall or maneuver around other obstacles in my path,” Clawson said.
Most people use Parkour techniques naturally, Andrus-Hughes said. “It’s actually helped me get to class sometimes,” he said after jumping over a waist-high streetlight instead of walking around it.
Andrus-Hughes said he was making Parkour runs almost everyday during the summer, although he has only been able to go out a couple of times since school has started.
Neither the University nor Eugene have clubs or organized Parkour teams, so Predum and Andrus-Hughes pick up new moves at www.urbanfreeflow.com, and try to coordinate runs with members of the Facebook group “Le Parkour.”
There is no scoring technique for Parkour, so no organized competition exists. That would go against the basic principle of the sport, Andrus-Hughes said.
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