E-Mail This Article to a Friend The flow of freerunning (continued)
	Related links Sebastien Foucan Sebastien Foucan is one of the founders of parkour and is regarded as the creator of the Eastern-influenced philosophy surrounding it. His Web site (which can also be accessed at www.parkour.com) includes a history of the sport, information on Foucan’s PK philosophy, and video of Foucan in the documentary Jump London and in commercials for Nike and Toyota. David Belle David Belle co-founded parkour in the 1980s with his childhood friend Sebastien Foucan. The two parted ways in 2002, with Foucan pursuing parkour as a philosophical calling and Belle focusing on marketing the sport internationally. Belle’s Web site includes some sweet videos and pics, but the text is in French. C’est la vie. Urban Freeflow Founded in 2003 by a group of traceurs, Urban Freeflow has some 11,000 registered members internationally. Much of the web community here resides in either the US or the United Kingdom, and you’ll find handy forums organized by region and topic as well as training info, videos and pics, and even some PK clothing. Boston Parkour Boston Parkour is a fairly basic website with links to pictures and videos of PK jams in and around Beantown. The site also includes a schedule of upcoming practice sessions and area jams. UK Parkour Association Parkour is all the rage in the UK, the country that sports the most traceurs. The nonprofit UK Parkour Association was founded in 2003 and receives up to 73,000 hits a day. The site provides info on training and the history of parkour, and maintains an active message board. Speed Air Man SpeedAirMan is an international parkour Web site that features forums in English and French as well as the latest PK articles, pictures, and downloads submitted by members all over the world.

Dingley and Filipos represent the majority of traceurs worldwide — teenagers, often boys, with access to the Internet, an unending supply of energy, and very little fear of death.

The message board on urbanfreeflow.com is a clearinghouse for these young traceurs, most of whom hope to hook up and practice with a crew and eventually organize a meeting to show off their skills. On urbanfreeflow, traceurs can post messages on regional boards to find out who’s practicing when and where. While the Maine board is nearly empty (Toorock can only think of three registered Maine freerunners), the Massachusetts board tends to be busy enough during the school season to be worth checking out, with somewhere between 10 and 25 regular visitors, according to Toorock. These two dozen Boston traceurs are a strong up-and-coming scene, he says.

Yeah, 25 traceurs qualify as a scene. Cut them some slack, it’s a new sport.

The biggest PK scenes stateside (and the busiest regional PK message boards on urbanfreeflow) serve New York City, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, says Toorock — cities that have about 100 traceurs each.

Traceurs in the Boston area have aliases like "Ductmonkey," "Triggerhappyjak," and "The Only Upriser." The traceur scene in Boston is unofficially headquartered at the campus of Northeastern University, which might explain why the urbanfreeflow message board is peppered with liberal-arts-inspired earnestness. Upriser tags each post with a quote from philosopher Iris Murdoch: "Our creative struggle, our search for wisdom and truth, is a love story." Another traceur, called "Krazydiaperboi," entertains a minimalist bent — the young freerunner from Canton finishes his frenetic, nearly incomprehensible posts with the phrase "You live. You flow. You die."

Toorock says the Internet has always been an important means of communication for traceurs looking to jam, but here in the US, it’s particularly crucial.

"The US scene is a lot more spread out than a lot of other scenes; in the UK you’ve got much more participants in a country that’s a fraction of the size [of the US]," he says. "In the US, it’s more difficult to get teams together. You need the Internet, you can’t just go somewhere and find someone doing parkour."

Despite the inherent extremeness of a sport where leaping over walls and flipping around rails is the norm, the Boston-area traceurs on urbanfreeflow.com seem decidedly gentle. They go out of their way to give strangers rides to jams, they offer up encouragement and dish about injuries, and many of them put things like school, girlfriends, and trips to the Museum of Science above parkour.

But at the professional level, the world of parkour is often not so sweet. Belle and Foucan, the childhood friends who created the sport, parted ways soon after Foucan shot a famous series of Nike ads in 2002 (you might have seen them — he was running from a chicken). Belle has since had limited success marketing the sport through a fledgling international parkour association; Foucan has formed a splinter group called the Taoris, who practice the sport as a philosophical calling in the Eastern tradition. According to Toorock, few professional parkour groups manage to stay together for any amount of time because the elite freerunners are plagued by infighting and competition for the few lucrative endorsements that are available.

For the time being, though, the owners of urbanfreeflow.com have avoided such pitfalls. In January, urbanfreeflow scored a key endorsement with Adidas shoes for an amount that Toorock declined to reveal. The site’s professional PK team has traveled around the world performing the sport for money. To date, the site has 11,000 registered traceurs internationally.

In Portland, amateur traceurs Dingley and Filipos don’t worry much about the politics of the whole thing. They just think it’s cool there’s a name for messing around and acting like a jackass. And the fact that there’s a whole philosophy that goes with it? Hell, even better.

Their biggest parkour annoyance to date has been being ousted from prime spots in Portland. They stress, however, that real traceurs respect property and don’t damage anything. And when they’re asked to leave, they leave — no trouble.

Defying the robots

Back at the stairwell in Portland, Levesque takes a break from "sessioning" the site. He’s done the wall climb, a Kong-vault over a high wall into a roll, and a couple of elegant precision leaps. His girlfriend has watched patiently from the sidelines, although she’s getting chilly and is dropping hints that Levesque should think about wrapping things up soon.

Levesque looks up the stairwell. He has a thin, wiry body that lends itself well to "monkeying around," as he calls it. Despite throwing himself into walls, up walls, and over walls for the past 20 minutes, he doesn’t seem particularly winded.

"Parkour is appealing because it’s not boring," he says. "The day-to-day activities of so many people — it’s just like a bunch of robots walking around.

"That’s why it’s so freeing. A lot of people just walk up and down these stairs, but I can do so much more."

If Levesque can find traceurs locally and convince those from out of town to migrate for a weekend, his planned August jam will be the first ever in the city. Though there has been some sign that the sport has registered on the local cultural radar — the 2004 Festival of Cultural Exchange in Portland featured a parkourist from Boston — parkour remains largely alien there. That bodes well for traceurs looking to experiment under the police radar, but can make it tough to jam and hone skills.

Then again, parkourists are in the business of flowing over obstacles. Why should this one stop them?

Sara Donnelly can be reached at sdonnelly[a]phx.com