Parkour
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How do you view your city? Does it feel constricting to you? Restrictive? Is it full of cold, lifeless structures? Unwelcoming? Unappealing? Or do you have no feeling about it, positive or negative? What’s your vision of the urban environment you inhabit? Perhaps one of the most powerful and profound changes that happen to those…
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Parkour, stripped down, is the use of space. It’s how we fill space, how we move through it. It’s a process. And it has often struck me when training and moving that the vast majority of that space is filled with what most would consider to be ‘unspectacular’ movement: that is, the gaps and distances…
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Trying to pinpoint the exact moment of the birth of Parkour is no easy task. In fact, it may actually prove to be an impossibility. Something as nebulous and indefinable as this thing we practise tends to defy classification. Already it boasts several names, in more than one language: Le Parkour, the Art of Movement,…
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Much has been made of Bruce Lee’s enduring concept of Jeet Kune Do, across myriad different activities, art-forms, sports and disciplines. Often it is applied quite wrongly, of course, flourished with bravado in a slapdash attempt to justify some sort of unstructured and unresearched approach to training or development. Nothing could be further from what…
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It isn’t fashionable these days to talk about training or self-improvement in terms of conflict – we often hear how we are meant to train smart, not hard; to pace ourselves; to work within our limits; to adhere to the principles of sports science throughout…
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What is it, ‘to be strong’? Why do we push ourselves every day to be fitter, faster, stronger, more fearless, more capable, more efficient? Who can jump the furthest? Who can run the fastest or climb the highest? Who can face the most danger? Who can do the most twists in a somersault? How could…
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For me, parkour is simple. It is a warrior’s art. It’s 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…
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“Moderation?” He leaped on the desk, like an evangelist. “It’s mediocrity, fear, and confusion in disguise. It’s the devil’s reasonable deception. It’s the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence sitters of the world afraid to take a stand to live or die. Moderation is…
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It looks like parkour, sounds like parkour, is called parkour… it must be parkour, right? Wrong. Over the last few years we have seen a proliferation of parkour or freerunning academies all over the world, fantastic indoor and outdoor spaces with great equipment, purpose-built structures and bespoke training environments. They’ve become all the rage in…
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What’s the point of being fit? Have you ever asked yourself this simple question? Many would say it’s to ensure we have a long, wholesome life; some kind of biological duty to our own bodies, to stay in mint condition until we finally succumb to old age and die, leaving an unblemished corpse. For me,…
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For the last few years one of the most popular workshops I’ve delivered at events and seminars around the world has been entitled Breaking the Jump, which is designed to focus on that aspect of parkour / freerunning which has always struck me as perhaps the most central, most essential , part of our discipline…
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A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal…
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A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook…
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I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible; to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk…
Dan Edwardes 