Le Parkour

[splinter]

I don't know the phonetic alphabet, but I'll try to explain...
"Le" (not sure if I have to explain this, but) the 'e' is similar to the 'u' in "turn"
"Par" - the 'a' is pronounced like it is in "Pal" or the first 'a' in "California"
"Cour" - like "tour".

And roll the r's.

[SevenStar]

I have officially made it my pursuit to be able to do that. In a year, I resolve to have it perfected. In two years, I will use it in the ring. I think the technique is really cool. I saw on a website how they have a reccommended way to land, to take off, etc. it was pretty technical.

[red5angel]

hey sevie, I started working on it this past summer, it synergizes real well with my capoeira. Turned out there was a group around here that did it, most of them half my age but I get together with them about once amonth or more to screw around with this sort of thing.

[SevenStar]

I put my kid in capoeira, and he loves it. He wanted me to try, and the instructor doesn't charge us (he charges everyone else though. He spars with me and also the other thai instructor, so he says we're family) - can't beat the price, and the training is awesome. My second job pretty much stops me from training judo anymore, so for the past several months it's been muay thai and capoeira.

[red5angel]

so you're doing it now?! Awesome! Is this with the same guy you were telling me about back in the day?

I'm still doing it, I had to switch groups for logistic reasons (hope to return in about a year) but I'm doing it with another group that's much closer and as much fun. I know for a fact it's because of capoeira that the parkour is happening for me at all.

[SevenStar]

Yeah, same guy and same group - Nacao Capoeira.

[GunnedDownAtrocity]

http://www.spikedhumor.com/articles/..._Stuntman.html

[Jingwu Man]

Eh, que c'est bon en esti, ca! C'est vraiment d'la cool!

Urm....pardon my french.

That was awesome. District 13, you say? Gotta look it up. Parkour means (loosely) run around, even though it's not spelt right.

[Royal Dragon]

So Melissa asks "Dad, can I go by Laurens?"

I reply "Sure, be home by about 6:00 for dinner"

Melissa responds by bolting through the living room, out the back sliding door filps up on to the rail of the porch, and does some sort of flipie/twistie thing over the banister & BUSHES, and lands in the grass, followed by a sterio typical gymnastics salute to the judges before bolting off to her friends house.

Now that makes a Daddy proud!

[jwvmn]

just wanted to let you guys know that the two videos mentioned in the thread are also on my website in quicktime format, in case anyone wants to put them on their ipod.....



http://www.veeneman.us

look for the "parkour videos" page

[GunnedDownAtrocity]

So Melissa asks "Dad, can I go by Laurens?"

I reply "Sure, be home by about 6:00 for dinner"

Melissa responds by bolting through the living room, out the back sliding door filps up on to the rail of the porch, and does some sort of flipie/twistie thing over the banister & BUSHES, and lands in the grass, followed by a sterio typical gymnastics salute to the judges before bolting off to her friends house.

Now that makes a Daddy proud!

got somfin in muh eye.

*snif*

[johnyk]

Wasn't jackie chan the original founder.
It should be called ChanJakdo not LeParkour

[GeneChing]

...but needing an update: here's our 'official' District B-13 thread.

[GeneChing]

In S.F., when someone 'comes out', we don't think of parkour.

The Free Runner
Will parkour be the vehicle that vaults Russian emigre Andrey Pfening to Hollywood stunt stardom?
Sam Whiting

The day Andrey Pfening came out as a traceur was no different from any other at Washington High School. He was walking across the courtyard explaining stunts he had seen in an action flick to a classmate. The other kid asked for a demonstration and Pfening turned and ran headlong toward a concrete pillar at the top of a wheelchair ramp.

At the point of impact, he planted his hands on top, monkey vaulted over and landed on his feet at the bottom of the ramp, 4 or 5 feet below.

It was over in a few seconds, but not quick enough to avoid the eye of the campus security guard. Had she been interested in the theory behind the maneuver, Pfening might have explained that he was running the "course of obstacles" known as parkour. At its essence, parkour describes the most direct route from Point A to Point B. There is no reason to arrive at Point B, but a traceur, as a parkourist calls himself, is in a hurry to get there just the same. If a traceur were in his backyard and needed to get to the backyard at the end of the street, he would go up and over all the fences in between. A traceur never goes around.

It is an admirable pursuit, but the security guard was not admiring. Her concern was liability. "Come here," Pfening recalls her saying. "I am going to send you home." He convinced the guard he would never do it again, and he didn't until the following Saturday. By then, he had a bigger plan.

Parkour, which derives from the French word "parcours" (which means journey, run, trip), evolved early this century in a Paris suburb and has been around San Francisco for a couple of years. There is a Web site called SFParkour.com with 100 or so registered traceurs. They adopt aliases such as Corndogg and No Sole and are happy to help beginners and sell them a $15 SF Parkour T-shirt with the logo of the traceur vaulting over the Golden Gate Bridge.

Pfening knew nothing of them at the time. A 17-year-old Russian emigre, he is not socially linked to the postcollegiate office workers who pursue it as an after-work steam burner. A quiet kid with no cell phone, he was online six months ago when he came across a film titled "District B13." The teaser describes it as taking place in a futuristic Parisian wasteland where the gangsters and drug lords are walled within their own lawless neighborhood. Now that is an after-school movie.

"I looked at the title and I just clicked download," he recalls.

The film, lamely dubbed in English, opens with much to recommend it - a dizzying montage in which a shirtless and tattooed acrobat gets away from any number of thugs with any number of weapons by climbing the walls of skyscrapers and leaping over a concrete canyon from a high roof to a much lower one, and so on.

The next day a friend, Slava Blazer, called. "He says, 'Let's go try this new thing. It's called parkour,' " says Pfening, who had never heard that word before Blazer mentioned it. Blazer invited Pfening over to watch a YouTube video and right away Pfening recognized the tricks from "District B13." "It was just a little bit weird," Pfening says.

Weirder still was when a third friend, Max Sidorov, checked in to talk about this video he had seen. That makes three Russian teenagers in the Richmond District separately discovering parkour at the same moment. This kind of coincidence you don't ignore. They formed a trio called the Piton Clan.

Because Pfening is a respectful son, he thought it imperative that his family - parents Yuriy and Viktoriya Pfening, babushka Sorokina Galina and 7-year-old sister Irina - see what he was getting into. So they squeezed together on a mattress that doubles as a couch to watch "District B13." They may have had no choice, because in their apartment, you are either in the room with the TV or in the room with the bunk beds. You can't hide in the kitchen - it's smaller than an airline galley. When all five Pfenings are home, it looks as if there are not enough places to sleep.

From an American point of view, this might be too much family togetherness. But the Pfenings do not have an American point of view. Originally from Uzbekistan, they had no way of staying afloat, so they tried Samara, Russia, which didn't work either. Andrey's Aunt Irina Sorokina was already in San Francisco and three years in a row she entered them in the green card lottery. The third time they won and over they came, not one speaking a word of English. It was December, 2002. Andrey's mother Viktoriya got trained as a medical assistant. Yuriy found work laying hardwood floors until his knees gave out. Then he starting driving an airport shuttle, pulling a double shift - 3 p.m. to 4 a.m. - on weekends.

They bunked with Aunt Irina in an apartment on Sutter Street until they scraped together the deposit on their own place in a walk-up populated by Russians and owned by a Pole. The rent is $800, but they are enjoying all the extra space of that second room. In Russia, they lived in a one-room apartment. "Three to a bed," Andrey says as his mother laughs. Still, they wouldn't mind a bathroom that isn't down the hall, or getting away from the cacophony of Clement Street and Seventh Avenue above Fela's Discount Store. This is where Andrey's plan comes into play, as visualized in "District B13."

continued next post

[GeneChing]

...from previous post

When the video rolled, his parents struggled to see that the Piton Clan was not headed toward a bad end. You have to get past the part where the hero pulls a crooked cop's head between the jail cell bars and then snaps his neck.

To their relief, Andrey did not see himself as either the heroin marketer or as the corrupt cop but as the sinewy stuntman. In "District B13," the trickery is done by David Belle, the Frenchman who invented parkour. In James Bond's latest "Casino Royale," it is Belle's pal Sebastien Foucan who climbs a steel beam as if it were a coconut tree, then does a flying trapeze maneuver onto a swinging construction crane. That is just two men getting all the glory. Andrey Pfening will be the third.

"I want to get into the movies or something," he says. "It is his dream," adds his mom, whose own dream is for her son to become an engineer. But that would waste his cosmonaut's good looks, plus he has ears that stick out like the new Bond's and the same compact build as his hero Belle.

"I just realized that this is a whole new thing and not many people are doing it right now," says Pfening, whose previous goal was to be the next Lance Armstrong. He'd train by humping his bike down the stairs and riding across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Rafael and back, always by himself. His mountain bike was the wrong equipment, but it was all he had. That's the beauty of parkour: There is no gear. "If I train hard for it, I have more of a percentage to get somewhere with it," he says.

At first, he would study the moves on video, then go to a park and try them with Blazer and Sidorov. There was a certain amount of risk in this, the worst kind for a kid - being laughed at.

"It was a little bit embarrassing because everybody was watching," he recalls.

Next, the Piton Clan went to Washington, or "George Washington," as Pfening formally calls it, way out at 32nd and Geary. They were guaranteed not to be laughed at there because, on weekends, it is locked up and surrounded by a 10-foot chainlink fence. "At first, of course I was scared," he recalls. "I just keep trying and getting it slowly. Little by little, there is this moment where you just are confident enough to go for it."

In time, the Piton Clan was absorbed into SF Parkour, and they all have the T-shirts. There are jams, as workouts are called, on Saturday mornings at Union Square and climbing nights at gyms. Pfening usually posts a Saturday afternoon jam at Washington, catching the wheezing and belching 2-Clement at the stop right in front of his primer gray front door, to get there.

Debarking the 2 Clement at the end of the line, he walks around to the back of the school, where Anza St. meets 30th Avenue. His first obstacle is the fence, one of those tightly wound Cyclones that make it tough to get a toehold in the old-fashioned sense of fence-climbing. This is not a worrisome complication for Pfening. He doesn't need toeholds. He scans the fence for the highest spot and then goes over it in two movements, exactly the way he saw Foucan do it in "Casino Royale." It is over so quick that he comes back over to the street side to demonstrate it again, landing feet together on the far side just like he is coming off the high horse.

On the other side is Chris Levesque, a veteran traceur who founded New England Parkour before moving here from Portland, Maine. Also standing there are two rookies who found SF Parkour on the Internet. One has a red natural like Bernie's in "Room 222" and the other is wearing a gelled-up Mohawk and T-shirt that reads, "I think Pot should be legal."

There are also some skateboarders loafing the concrete benches, but the two groups are in separate orbits and it is easy to tell the traceurs from the skaters. The traceurs are the ones who don't wear pads or gloves. They want to feel the rough surfaces they latch onto. Pfening's arms and hands are nicked like a butcher's. When he scrapes opens a scab he lets it bleed. Traceurs will climb on a rope or scaffold if it is already there. They will occasionally use a handrail, but only for their feet.

After introductions, they do some stretches then Pfening jumps up on a pillar and does a Mobius flip. "Is that your warm-up?" asks Levesque. The answer is no. Pfening's warm-up is walking on his hands down a flight of stairs. Levesque, whose handle is Kaos, is a pure traceur. Pfening, who goes by the less-imaginative Pfening Andrey, is a free runner, a showier offshoot of tracing developed by Foucan. Pfening is prone to planting a hand on a wall and pin wheeling around it, which has nothing to do with getting from one point to the next. He will jump up and stand atop a garbage can, like a crow.

As a parkour facility, Washington High has been greatly improved by a summer construction project, which means metal storage units that look like boxcars on a railroad. There are also garbage Dumpsters, with and without metal lids. Levesque and Pfening climb a chainlink fence, stand on the top of it and jump up to grab the ledge on the roof of a portable classroom. They scamper across it and drop down to the pavement then climb to the top of a Dumpster that connects to another portable roof.


After a few laps on that circuit, they go down to the football field to demonstrate the rudimentary roll. Pfening is a patient instructor, but soon enough his eyes fix on the 30-foot-high frieze at the back of the end zone. He scales it and climbs over the rail, then runs around to the grandstand, goes down the steps and across the field to do it again, always running as if being chased.

"Whenever we practice, we try and find spots like this where there are random things," Levesque says. "It's hard to find places where there is everything you want to practice on." Practice is clearly a high priority, but they are not practicing for anything specific. There are no goals for parkour, no huge buildings to conquer the way rock climbers train for the big walls. "There are some business men trying to take over parkour, turn it into a competitive thing," Levesque says. "But the vast majority of people across the world do this because they love it. They want to improve themselves and they want to help others. That's all there is to it."

But there is more to it for Pfening. He has been at this just six months, but is ready for exposure. He went looking for it at the Colorado Parkour National Jam a month ago. "Maybe there are going to be people who look for people to do some tricks to get into advertising," he says.

He didn't get a Hollywood deal, though the U.S. Army has shown an interest. Since his return from the "Big Jam," he has installed a pull-up bar in the kitchen door jamb to improve muscle definition and taken to free running with no shirt on, the way they do in the movies. His father, meanwhile, has left the airport shuttle and gotten a job in construction, which comes with family benefits, "in case I get hurt," Andrey says with a smile.

In the evenings, Sidorov comes by and they walk over to Mountain Lake Park to do some parkour work on that strangest of contrivances: a Par course. Walking up to a pair of slanting benches that form the "sit and reach" station, Pfening looks at the lengthy written instructions and laughs. He already knows how to use it. He stands on one of the benches and broad jumps to the second. He knows how to use the pull-up bars, too, as a challenging set of parallel bars. He dismounts with a back flip.

Sidorov, who just graduated from Lowell, was more brazen than Pfening in his school-day exuberance. Once, between classes, he scrambled onto the roof of the school, then went roof to roof, doing flips over the gaps, he says. This earned him a two-day suspension.

"They got mad for that, but you have to constantly train yourself," he explains. "My mom was like, 'Oh, he was on the roof? OK.' " Sidorov sounds like any other American teenager, while Pfening still sounds like a Russian. The difference, Sidorov says, is that he's been here two years longer. "Seven and a half years," he says, snapping his fingers. "Accent outtahere."

He's outtahere, too, headed to UC Davis. Blazer is already at UCLA. The Piton Clan is down to the Piton, and he mostly practices alone now. Behind his apartment building is a shared backyard that was overgrown and shared by nobody until Andrey discovered it. It took him three long days to haul away all the trash and overgrowth. He weeded it, then found a mattress on the street and dragged it back there. This is where he practices his flips.

At night, he stretches for an hour in front of the TV. Right away he could bend over backward and touch the floor, which came as a shock to his mother. As a child he showed no interest in the common Russian pursuit of gymnastics.

No one could have seen this coming except maybe a tough kid on the playground, years ago at Roosevelt Middle School, the brick fort on Arguello. He nicknamed this quiet new Russian Peter Parker, the real name of Spider-Man. No reason other than a vague resemblance. Pfening didn't climb anything then. The nickname lasted about a year, then faded away, but they ought to bring it back when they see Peter Parkour in action at Washington High this year.

-- video: For more parkour action, check out SFGate.com/magazine.