So, here I am at my desk one day last week, mulling over the fact that I have to establish some concrete goals. After preparing a small, handwritten list of options for the future, I begin to peruse some useful sites online, most notably Dan Johns lifting and throwing page . For those of you not familiar with Dan's work, he's a great O-lifting, throwing, and life-experience coach (for lack of a better word) as well as a great masters throwing, lifting and highland games athlete. Though his teaching progression for various strength and power movements is top-notch, his words of wisdom on the life-choices involved in training and sport are second-to-none. To distill his useful information to one ideal would be ludicrous, but I've never been afraid of ludicrousness, and I will attempt to do so now:

"Set a goal, find some system of measurement to keep track of progress, and bust your ass until you achieve it." 

    Sounds simple, huh? You would be surprised how far from the mark you might be in this seemingly simple charge, as most people fail to ever even set simple goals, much less actually MEASURE their progress against some objective system of random and varied tests.

   How Would an Objective Measure Apply to Parkour?

    Though the goal of every traceur is to facilitate useful movement that could aid in an emergency situation, very few serious practitioners ever set useful goals along these lines and then set about testing their ability to complete them. If this is the case, what is the use of espousing some vague ideal when you post on the internet, just to turn around and flounder uselessly at mundane tasks repeated indefinitely.           

            If the goal of our art is to escape or reach in emergency situation, how do we test for this? How do we motivate our training with the stress of battle, with some consequence to winning or losing?

            …wait, did I just say winning or losing?

            Athletics, business, life, survival…a short list of the natural competitions that serve as our most basic motivation: come out on top to perpetuate. Strive for excellence in your goals and rise to the top, or fail to do so and sink to obscurity. How natural is this drive? I can take a group of trainees and put them in front of a wall, then tell them to perform 20 wall-runs one after the other, as fast as possible. Their motivation will be their own improvement, and many of them will try very hard to perfect their movements. If, on the other hand, I had them race in heats of 5 and narrowed them down by single elimination until it was one on one and eventually we cold objectively order their performance on the board and they would have a visual representation of their ability. When this happens something changes. With an objective, visualized goal in front of them, most trainees performance will improve dramatically. When there are concrete goals, and concrete consequences to both winning and losing, the focus of training can be distilled, categorized, and approached systematically to perfection. To “Train smarter not harder” is a noble goal, but to train as hard as hell once you get smart is the road to excellence. Without some system to objectively measure your progress, your training is stalled as it’s never intelligent enough to adjust accordingly for maximum gain.

            There is all this talk about which training method is better than the other, whether Freerunning can help as a training modality for Parkour, whether big guys, small guys, French guys, guys who lift weights, gals who do gymnastics, kids on a diving team, etc. etc. etc. have the better methods for perfecting movement in their environment. Then we uphold the idea that we’re “preparing for emergencies” without ever truly testing these methods against each other. There is no reason not to. Without the competitive drive to fuel intelligent program design, there is no progress, and the true efficacy of an activity can never be challenged. This is the path to mediocrity and obscurity, the path of those who choose to never make a goal, follow a clear path towards its direction, and then bask in the glory of reaching the pinnacle of their absolute natural ability. 

            I started writing this nearly a month ago now, and have put off finishing it for more important projects, but the knee-jerk reactions of jerks (with knees) to the possibilities of competition in Parkour (insert gasp here) has spurred me on. I care little about the glory of a victory, about the possibility of prizes and fame. Rather, my greatest motivation, truthfully the only motivation worth acknowledging, is the need for objective input and output. Without a measure of performance, there is no foundation for logical argument, period. Those who are opposed to this measure are only interested in the illogical argument that is the Parkour community at the moment, a community where your spot is assured by keyboard skill and the ability to wield your arguments with eyes closed like a sheep. It’s time for a different line of thought, a functional standard by which we will form our training ideals to stand alongside other practical artists as the professionals in environmental movement that we strive to be.

            All of this and not a paragraph about what I feel would be a suitable competitive format? OK, I’ll comply; two events (much like the simplicity of the snatch and clean & jerk in Olympic Weightlifting). Event #1: run an obstacle course for time. This course would feature varied obstacles that would give options for movement that mirror the many different environments that we face. Each participant would run the same course 3 times and only the fastest time would be retained. Event #2: On a slightly less-complicated course, two participants would set off; one being chased, the other doing the chasing. If the Traceur being chased made it to the end without being caught, that is one point for him. They would then switch places and continue in this fashion. The first to three points wins, and this would continue in tournament fashion until one Traceur comes out on top. The positioning for the tournament would be based on the times in event #1.

            Is it perfect? Most definitely not, but for 5 minutes of thought it beats the usual “LOL, OMG you are so not a traceur because that extra step is SOOO not Parkour, blah blah blah” that you find within the usual internet banter to nowhere. How about this, I’m off to train, if you have an intelligent argument against this, give it your best shot, until then, I’m pushing towards a day where I can give my trainees something to aim for. Now there’s a goal that I should add to that list…

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