On the Thursday morning I arrive in London, my phone pings with a message from a teenage mother and school dropout named Shirley Darlington: "Kilburn tube station, 7pm."
I get there 10 minutes early, but about 20 women are already warming up, including the British movie actress Christina Chong and her sister Lizzi, a professional dancer.
Every Thursday, Shirley emails the 100 or so members of her all-female Parkour crew, revealing the secret location for that night's challenge. She keeps the venue a surprise so her crew never knows what to expect, and she keeps guys away because the biggest threat to Parkour - as even Parkour's all-male founders would agree - is testosterone.
"Young guys turn up, and lots of times all they want is the flash and not the fundamentals," says Dan Edwardes, the master instructor who gave Shirley her start. "They want to backflip off a wall and leap around on rooftops. With a group of lads, you'll get the show-off, the questioner, the giddy one. But in a women's group, there's none of that. It's very quiet. They get to it."
What I was after was even more fundamental than the fundamentals. I'd only come to Parkour by accident while chasing the secrets of the most remarkable athletes of our time - World War Two resistance fighters.
I'd become fascinated with the underground when I realised it wasn't made up of hardened soldiers. Often, they were civilians hiding behind enemy lines who had to live off the land while attacking Hitler's forces in gruelling hit-and-run operations.
Take Crete - on that small Greek island, farmers and shopkeepers were joined by British academics and poets who'd essentially been recruited just because they knew Ancient Greek. For the next four years, these misfits routinely covered ultra-marathon distances over mountain peaks and pulled off feats of strength and endurance that would stagger an Olympic athlete. I wanted to learn - what was their secret? And could I master it too?
One clue came from Samuel Gridley Howe, an American medic who joined the Greek Revolution in the early 1800s. Howe was amazed by the way Greek fighters seemed to bounce along the landscape, using so little effort that they barely needed food or rest. "A Greek soldier," Howe commented, "will march, or rather skip, all day among the rocks, expecting no other food than a biscuit and a few olives, or a raw onion, and at night, lies down content upon the ground with a flat rock for a pillow." (...)
To me, this sounded remarkably similar to what I knew of Parkour, the French street art of using the body's natural elastic recoil to leap and flow across the urban outback.
I wondered if Parkour's pioneers, seven French street kids who called themselves the "Yamakasi", and learned their basic moves from a survivor of colonial jungle fights in French-occupied Asia - might have rediscovered the same ancient athletic principle which allowed the Cretans to cover fantastic distances with remarkably little effort.
by Christopher McDougall, BBC | Read more:
Image: Ben Curwen
I get there 10 minutes early, but about 20 women are already warming up, including the British movie actress Christina Chong and her sister Lizzi, a professional dancer.Every Thursday, Shirley emails the 100 or so members of her all-female Parkour crew, revealing the secret location for that night's challenge. She keeps the venue a surprise so her crew never knows what to expect, and she keeps guys away because the biggest threat to Parkour - as even Parkour's all-male founders would agree - is testosterone.
"Young guys turn up, and lots of times all they want is the flash and not the fundamentals," says Dan Edwardes, the master instructor who gave Shirley her start. "They want to backflip off a wall and leap around on rooftops. With a group of lads, you'll get the show-off, the questioner, the giddy one. But in a women's group, there's none of that. It's very quiet. They get to it."
What I was after was even more fundamental than the fundamentals. I'd only come to Parkour by accident while chasing the secrets of the most remarkable athletes of our time - World War Two resistance fighters.
I'd become fascinated with the underground when I realised it wasn't made up of hardened soldiers. Often, they were civilians hiding behind enemy lines who had to live off the land while attacking Hitler's forces in gruelling hit-and-run operations.
Take Crete - on that small Greek island, farmers and shopkeepers were joined by British academics and poets who'd essentially been recruited just because they knew Ancient Greek. For the next four years, these misfits routinely covered ultra-marathon distances over mountain peaks and pulled off feats of strength and endurance that would stagger an Olympic athlete. I wanted to learn - what was their secret? And could I master it too?
One clue came from Samuel Gridley Howe, an American medic who joined the Greek Revolution in the early 1800s. Howe was amazed by the way Greek fighters seemed to bounce along the landscape, using so little effort that they barely needed food or rest. "A Greek soldier," Howe commented, "will march, or rather skip, all day among the rocks, expecting no other food than a biscuit and a few olives, or a raw onion, and at night, lies down content upon the ground with a flat rock for a pillow." (...)
To me, this sounded remarkably similar to what I knew of Parkour, the French street art of using the body's natural elastic recoil to leap and flow across the urban outback.
I wondered if Parkour's pioneers, seven French street kids who called themselves the "Yamakasi", and learned their basic moves from a survivor of colonial jungle fights in French-occupied Asia - might have rediscovered the same ancient athletic principle which allowed the Cretans to cover fantastic distances with remarkably little effort.
by Christopher McDougall, BBC | Read more:
Image: Ben Curwen
