Posted by For me, parkour is simple.
It is a warrior’s art.
It is everyday adversity.
It demands your all and makes no apologies. It expects your best and accepts nothing less. It’s a personal journey toward self-mastery, honest self-expression and realisation.
It’s a living art born out of visceral experience of the real world. It isn’t for show. It can be hard; unforgiving in its constant assessment of you, of your abilities, your strengths and weaknesses in mind and body.
It’s a gauntlet thrown down before you every time you train. It can be brutal. Unscientific; politically incorrect; a constant examination of the self through challenge and adversity.
Pass that examination and you will be rewarded with a profound insight into who you are. It will reveal facets of yourself that you never knew existed.
It asks you difficult questions; probes your weak spots; identifies the parts that are broken. Then it demands that you fix them, that you grow strong in those places. It doesn’t care for excuses, or rationalisations of mediocrity or failure. It knows you are stronger than you think.
But it can be joyous, too. Liberating like nothing else. Empowering. Genuine. It can reconnect you to a deeper part of yourself, that part which remains unsullied by fear, capitulation, submission, conformity.
It can be a pure moment: for to understand yourself in movement you must find a harmony between body and mind, a balance between control and surrender.
It’s challenge, it’s discovery, it’s experimentation, it’s expression, it’s innovation, it’s adaptation, it’s the great adventure. It’s everything and it’s nothing.
It’s life, pushing at you.
And you have to push back.
Dan Edwardes 