Parkour flips to mainstream

By Matt Williams Colorado Daily

June 11, 2007

Boulder, CO (CSTV U-WIRE) -- Dressed in a red Under Armour shirt and sweatpants, CU junior Ryan Ford gets down on all fours and sprawls on the ground in a Spiderman pose for an impromptu 30-second warmup session.

Then, he vaults over a concrete wall, and in midair, grabs a tree branch before landing on a small slab of ground 10 feet away. That's the easy part. He can also run up 12-foot high walls and traverse the side of a building - even if that means using just a window for a foothold.

Who knew the University of Colorado's Euclid AutoPark could be so much fun?

Ford, 20, is regarded to be one of the best "parkour" athletes in the Unites States. Parkour is an activity invented 20 years ago in Paris in which people move acrobatically through cityscapes and wilderness obstacles using a combination of gymnastics and daredevilry.

"It's definitely becoming more mainstream," Ford says. "It has remained underground for quite a while � and it was virtually unheard of by almost everyone until five years ago. In the past few (years), it really started to take off in Europe and the UK."

Ford was introduced to the sport just four years ago when he and a couple of high school buddies surfed the Internet for instructions about how to do a wall flip. They found parkour videos, and Hall has been hooked ever since.

Through years of work on Web site www.coloradoparkour.com and a Yahoo discussion group, Ford has helped build Boulder's parkour scene into one of the most active in the United States. Ford estimates there are about 250 hardcore "traceurs" - people who do parkour on a regular basis - in the state of Colorado.

Boulder, especially, is regarded as an ideal location because of its copious open space and its high-density downtown as well as the architecture at CU.

"The thing about parkour is that there are no set movements," Ford said. "There are basic movements that are pretty common to all obstacles, but in the environment � every place has a unique situation and parkour is about figuring out how best to do the situation in front of you."

Ford aspires to make the emerging activity a full-time job when he is done with his business degree at the university. He teaches classes on the basics of the sport and wants to eventually open a parkour-specific training gym someday.

He has even started an extracurricular project to study parkour's biomechanics to figure out optimal techniques to avoid injury. And make no mistake: fear and danger is a big lure for those who are new to it.

That perception has been reinforced by edgy YouTube-style videos scattered on the Internet that play up the riskiest parkour stunts, like jumping across rooftop spans and backflipping from a 20-foot ledge.

Ford says parkour is really about incremental self-progression - doing a little more one day than you did the day before. He says a baseline of fitness - 20 consecutive pull-ups and 60 push-ups in a minute is a minimum starting point - and some research is important for beginners.

"It's definitely very hard on your legs if you don't have the strength," he says. "So you definitely need to hit the weight room and start doing some Olympic lifts and power lifts - stuff that uses a lot of muscles."

Ford has earned the nickname "Demon" among local traceurs. He is also a member of the 11-person American Parkour Team called "The Tribe." The group is in negotiations with K-Swiss for an endorsement deal. There is also talk parkour will soon become a demonstration sport in the X-Games and the Olympics.

Some people think parkour is on the verge of becoming the next hot sport, like mixed-martial arts.

"That's actually a very controversial subject in the parkour community," Ford says. "A lot of people who have been around a while want to call (parkour) their own and they don't want it to be commercialized because they think it will ruin it."