When I first had the idea for this article, my plan was to talk about the differences between parkour communities in different parts of the United States. I expected them to fall neatly into categories: Community X practices this way, and Community Y practices that way. But, of course, things in real life rarely fall neatly into categories. Instead, I discovered that there are as many different ways of practicing parkour as there are traceurs and traceuses. Everyone I talked to has a different way of practicing; Johnathon enjoys practicing by himself; Alissa likes to train with groups the best; Chad is a personal trainer and a patient teacher; Cody is a wizard in the air and spends much of his free time training; Ryan is inspired by the freedom of movement, and has been doing parkour for over eight years; Haley goes to places she knows and challenges herself to conquer her fears; Seng enjoys the mixture of discipline and play, and resonates with parkour’s reclamation of public spaces.

Chicago:
Still, despite all the differences between individual practitioners, there are more parallels between parkour communities than differences. As Ryan “Cloud” Cousins of Aero (http://www.chicagoparkour.net) notes, parkour communities “tend to be similar to each other, but they tend to have an emphasis on different things. On teaching, conditioning, having a fun time. But in general they’ll all cover the same format.”
Things like safety, for example, are universal. Knowing your limits is always important, whether you’re a beginner or an experienced traceur! Cody “SSJ3500” Beltramo and Ryan agree. One of the important things to remember when your training is to “put an emphasis on safety, and always working within [your] limits,” Ryan says. “Listen to your body and train as often as possible. Always know when to take breaks and give your body time to recover as well.”
“Don’t do anything too crazy too soon,” Cody adds. “If you want to try something crazy, go to a gym,” where it’s easier to find spotters and take safety precautions. Cold Chicago winters combined with a lively interest in tricking result in regular get-togethers at several local gyms during the winter months. Cody goes to several each week, and in warmer weather he trains in parks and on the obstacles he built in his backyard. “I just like to keep training and training and training. It’s fun,” he explains.
This wasn’t always the case, though. Even though it was fun, “up until about a year and a half into my training, I never went out and trained by myself. Ever. It was just always me and my friends. And that was when I started realizing that I wanted to improve, and actually get really good at this,” says Cody. That was the day he started training by himself on a regular basis. Since then, Cody, Ryan, and several other traceurs have instituted a weekly training session/jam at a local park, where new traceurs can come and learn the basics, and more experienced traceurs can come to exchange ideas and work on their technique.
In training sessions like these, “A lot of more experienced traceurs will find themselves doing more teaching in group sessions than training on their own,” Ryan notes. But it’s important to find a balance. “In groups is a great way to learn and have more-experienced traceurs teach you, but it’s also important to focus on individual training as well.”
Aero, the largest community in the Chicago area, “has been around for an extremely long time, so we have a lot of traceurs who have been around for a long time,” says Ryan. “But we also tend to have some fun jams, where we focus more on the roots of parkour, which is just playing around and having fun.”

Madison:
In Madison, having fun with MadPK (http://www.madparkour.com) can often take the form of a game outside, like follow-the-leader. “It took a while before I realized that parkour is really just about interacting with the things on the playground,” Alissa “Muse_of_Fire” Bratz remembers. It’s important to have fun, and Alissa tries to make sure she and the people she’s training with incorporate play into their training. When she’s training, “interacting with the environment in simple ways” is important. Interactions don’t have to take the form of huge, eye-catching displays; they can be as simple as paying attention to her foot placement while walking down the sidewalk.
Inside, during the winter, group training calls for a slightly different strategy. In order to keep everyone interested and allow people to try interacting with obstacles in new and different ways, “We developed a system where we’d have stations and rotate” explains Chad Barrett. “That way they’d only be doing something for, like 10 minutes, but they’d do as many reps as they could.” That way everybody gets to try everything and stay interested, but nobody is too crowded. Chad makes sure drills are scalable, so that traceurs of all experience levels can be challenged in their interactions with the obstacles at each station.
Working with groups like this can be very important. “I’m a very social person,” Alissa explains. “I think that’s why I had trouble training by myself at first. I’d go to the playground and do some squats, then see something to try, and I’d do it like two times and stop. Going to the jams and talking to more experienced traceurs/traceuses helped because they’d suggest other things to do.” She particularly likes learning about progressions that require her to master new skills one step at a time, so that she can keep moving towards new goals at her own pace.
Jonathon Allen has a different take on things, though. Jonathon, who is also a runner, is used to working on his own, so training parkour skills on his own came more naturally. He’s comfortable spending much of his training time by himself, “But I still like some scheduled practice with a group every so often,” he notes. Both kinds of training are important.
Chad discovered the MadPK website right after it was first created. “I volunteered to help the next day – I don’t usually do that,” he says. “I just knew I had to do this.” Since there were no other traceurs to learn from in the Madison area, Alissa and Chad “had to learn things slowly at first. You don’t just start out with a vault. We had to figure things out by ourselves.” Like many new traceurs, they had to rely on trial and error, supplemented by videos and advice from people in other communities, when they were first learning the basics.
When it came time to find a location for the Midwest Jam, MadPK volunteered. “We wondered if we were out of our minds,” Alissa says. “We’d only been doing this for a few months, and we were very much doing beginner stuff, and there were experts coming. But that was one of the cool things. We decided to just show them the spots, because they’d see things to do that we didn’t know to look for. And they came up with things we hadn’t even thought of yet.”
The Midwest Jam turned out to be a great opportunity to get new ideas. “Working with other traceurs helps us see ‘old’ areas in new and creative ways,” Jonathon says. “They see different ways to approach obstacles that we hadn’t thought of, because we’re ‘used to’ them. So it helps spark a new way of seeing favorite spots.”

San Francisco:
The motto on the main page of the Bay Area Parkour website (http://baparkour.ning.com) is “Train hard – stay humble,” and many traceurs strive to reflect this mentality. Much of the emphasis in BApk is on mastering and continually improving fundamental techniques, and on learning one’s own personal style. Everyone has both something they can teach and something they can learn. Seng “messenger33” Chen stresses that it is important “to be willing to learn from anyone and to appreciate the abilities of others while maintaining safe progression.”
Teaching others is important in any parkour community, and experienced traceurs are often called upon to demonstrate, teach, and learn with the beginners. In the Bay Area, Seng often helps lead the BApk beginner sessions. He explains that “Teaching others usually gives me deeper understanding of my own technique, but it’s also a skill in itself.” Like many traceurs who find themselves as teachers, Seng challenges himself “to figure out how to teach and motivate people” in his community. When speaking to new practioners, Seng asks them “what they want to learn and how they see the parkour fitting into their life. I think having a sense of why one trains dictates how one trains.”
Try to “See if you can hook up with a community in your area,” Haley “Orem” recommends to the new traceur. Having a community where there are all different kinds of people and skill levels can be beneficial, no matter what stage a traceur’s progress has reached. “Don’t let yourself be intimidated or discouraged by those who can do more than you right now. You’ll find doing your best will keep compiling over time and progress will reveal itself.”
On a personal level, Seng is attracted to the idea that parkour “can be a reminder to adults, especially in very busy North Americans, that there should be time and space made for unstructured play.” He explains that “I like how [parkour] re-envisions and reclaims public spaces. It has a very interesting mix of discipline and play which I think is very tough for some people to grasp, including dedicated practitioners.” Both elements are crucial – play isn’t as fun without the discipline it takes to know your limits and improve, but discipline without play can strip all the enjoyment out of learning.
For many people, parkour often ends up being a microcosm of life as a whole. “Maybe the most important thing I’ve learned from parkour is that I can crash and heal,” Seng says. “I don’t recommend crashing to learn this (and by crashing I mostly mean small miscalculations which result in scrapes, not large ones which end in broken bones, though I’ve had the latter, also), but I feel like I’d stopped taking enough risks in my life and it was important to remember my resilience, not just physically but also in my career.”

Despite their many differences, parkour communities across the US tend to have many of the same goals regarding teaching, training, and keeping a beginner mentality. And, of course, the concept of playing and having fun is always a huge component! Haley sees that different communities still have a lot in common. “Differences seem to result more from the personalities of the people in the communities rather than the training, but I have seen some cross-pollination,” she says. “I’ve the benefit of being close to a couple communities, and as I see it there are more similarities than differences.”

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