American Parkour

You walk past a building, turn to your friend and say: "it's shit like that which makes me f#cking hate trespassing laws..."

seconded.

when you've given half the campus security officers your number in case some of the less wholsome traceurs on campus need chasing off of a roof or similar hard to reach areas.

as i've mentioned before i'm a security guard in the Madison area. a few nights ago i was patrolling greenway station (that huge strip mall thing on the west side) and the west side supervisor told me they had problems with some people climbing on their roofs all the time. i know the vast majority of MadPK especially doesn't do roofs but -and i hate to admit this- most of my fellow security guards aren't too bright and if they see you vault something they might just assume you're going to climb a building and WILL call real law enforcement. usually that's not that big of a deal but he also mentioned that Red Development (who owns greenway station) is ready to prosecute and make an example of someone so they might lean on the cops to be a little less than leniant/civil. just something to keep in mind.

i know it's cheesy but i think fight science or one of those shows did a bit on parkour and they went in depth into the physics of the roll.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBNaiNnNRfU

hey science + brian doyle + danny ilabaca
win in my book.

ask someone in the airforce too. they do roll drills granted they aren't parkour rolls but it's the same concept. they do it for parachute type stuff.

Question:

As a security guard, do you have any hints/tips as to what the building owners would require to allow training on the spot?

It's occurred to me but I've never had a conflict where it's been necessary.

It will be different with every building owner. some it might just require a bit of sweet talk on the first meeting and a healthy dose of respect for the property. others will be completely against anything like that for instance the site i was at that day was an insurance company so they're paranoid about insurance and lawsuits so they'd never agree to it. perhaps asking in advance would work with some people. mostly though just go on a case by case basis. and always be pleasant to deal with. don't give them any reason to say no.

ummm can't run in my pj's i think i'd get arrested for something completely un-parkour-related

positive: was training on campus (i train with a few of the campus security guys so i don't get bugged much) and a couple track guys saw me doing vaults and ended up joining me for training that day and several more training sessions afterwords. woot new recruits.

negative: i was doing a cat balance across a reasonably stable chunk of fence. (just enough wobble to up the challenge a little) and this dude who was probably a sophomore or so came up and said "hey ***hole get offa there you're not sposed to be there" my initial response was cheeky, something like "not your fence chill." he shouted some more obscenities at me so i decided to do it peacefully "fine just wait for me to get to the end i'll get down that way it's easier." but the jerk decides that's not fast enough and shakes the darn fence as hard as he can. i managed to hang on enough to swing down pretty safely. and when i hit the ground and roll to my feet the coward just ran away lol.

i always thought there was a tension between skateboarders and other "extreme street sports" and parkour because we don't want people mentally associating parkour with that kind of thing. i'm not saying that all skateboarders are bad news but a lot of people view them as hooligans. and with us trying to portray ourselves as quite the opposite i figured it was an intentional distancing.

i saw a guy do a kong while i was at work i was very excited. i figured i had found someone new to train with. unfortunately i'm a security guard so i had to ask him not to do that on the property but if he wants to train elsewhere sometime i'd be in. he cussed me out and then left when i offered to let him talk to police about there being laws against parkour on private property. as he walked away he turned to this guy who had just been standing next to him the whole time and said some thing to the effect of "too bad they're such a**holes around here it'd be great for a parkour battle."

a parkour BATTLE?!  >_< 

i kinda wanted to mace him then and there. have you guys had to deal with this kind of person before? and if so how? cuz macing them (which i didn't do) would have been the wrong choice but they weren't gonna hear reason.

I've been stopped twice. probably because most of my training is in a small town where the cops literally have nothing better to do than drive through the park. i was practicing cat balance up a railing then about a ten foot drop. cop pulled up and asked me what i was doing, i explained that it's great exercise and asked if he'd like to learn. he said he'd think about it and not to do it when there were little kids around, because they could try to copy me and get hurt.

the other time was at a minijam on campus. a campus police woman pulled up and asked what we were doing. luckily there were several very knowledgeable people in the group and by the time she left with "well you're making people nervous could you do it somewhere else" (which we promptly did) they had not only explained parkour training and some philosophy they had done a few drills as demonstrations, but we had the entire thing on video. how's that for PR. i think if she hadn't been forty something and on duty she would have joined in. that was a good day.