I think my health/fitness blogs are trying to kill me. First Cranky Fitness has a post about Parkour and Free Running then a day later there's another post on them over at Mark's Daily Apple. If a picture's worth a thousand words then a video must be worth, well, a whole lot more:
Yeah, I know, how can you watch that and not go 'Ouch my knees' about 50 million times. But there is something oddly appealing about it. Not the leaping tall building in a single bound part or the jumping off of high objects part and well I guess I couldn't even explain which part but something about a toned down version of it seems like it might be fun. I went so far as to look up Parkour classes in Boulder and wouldn't you know there's a place downtown that does them on Saturdays and they have beginner classes. They're reasonably priced too, I can trash my knees, put my back out and get a concussion for the low low price of just $15 for drop in or $100 for 10 classes. But my god people, look at how young the instructors are. 20 and 23? Do they know the first thing about 43 year old old lady knees? Frankly I think it's pure madness. Yet somehow I'm still entertaining the idea. I think if you combined a toned down version of this with an amped up version of canine freestyle you could have some serious fun. Or break your legs. Either way.
Realistically, I think Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders' hilarious send up of Parkour is about the best I could hope for for myself:
I didn't know it had a name. I've only seen it done on those "amazing" video shows, where people crash badly.
ReplyDeleteCrazy!
Tom watched with me and thinks it's inspired by Jackie Chan stunts.
Oh, wow, I've never heard of it, and I want to do it, too! (But add: 52 yrs, bad knees, bad back, bad shoulders, I'd be lucky to be as good as the ladies in the 2nd video.)
ReplyDeleteSome of the stuff in the video just looks like climbing maneuvers--people who go up cliffs and mountains have amazing strength. But a lot of the active jumping and bouncing, man, I'd see that in movies and figure that they had to be blue-screening it with harnesses or whatever, so it revives my faith in the world that real humans (by some definition of the word) can actuallY DO these things! Thanks for posting.
-ellen
Wow! I love your idea of combining canine freestyle with Parkour!
ReplyDeleteI think you might be on to something!
I'll even give you a name for it:
BARK-our!!!
tee hee!
(don't hurt the poor poochies, tho!)
Bark-our-ha! I love it. Strummy is already a daredevil, I'm in a daily struggle to stop him from his crazy leaping.
ReplyDelete