by Brian Cognato > University of Maryland, College Park     photos Ryder Haske

No Photoshop was used in their production, no special effects, wire or green screens. The only “special effect” is parkour.

“Stretching your body to its absolute limit and just being the best you can be, that’s parkour,” says Binny Seth, the founder of the George Washington University’s parkour club. Purists define it as “moving from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible.”

Mark Toorock, the unofficial leader of the American parkour community, prefers “a training methodology using overcoming physical obstacles to improve both physically and mentally.” The essence is the same. Move. As quickly as possible. And don’t let anything get in your way.

Practitioners of parkour, who refer to themselves as traceurs (like most parkour jargon, it’s French), run through cities, through parks, even just through the woods, with the goal of overcoming every obstacle in their path with as much speed and power as possible. If that means jumping from one rooftop to another, so be it. If it means leaping over a mid-sized sedan, so be it. If it means climbing the face of an apartment complex, well, so be it.

Every feature of everything around you becomes another aspect of your own personal jungle gym. Most traceurs especially enjoy densely populated, urban areas because they’re thick with potential obstacles, each one a potential achievement. Seth’s favorite place to run is New York City. “It’s no limits,” he says. He especially recommends the scaffolding.

But what looks like random thrill-seeking actually carries with it a well-developed philosophy that emphasizes discipline and self-control as much as freedom. Traceurs practice the same drills over and over again, hundreds of times, so that they master all their moves before risking them in real life. Safety first: there’s nothing “efficient” about cracking your skull.

“You don’t try something until you know you can do it,” says Seth. “So you want to jump over a six-foot fence? You start with maybe a three-foot fence, and practice that a few hundred times. Then you move to a four-foot fence, and do that a few hundred times. Then a five-foot fence. Then you go for the six-foot fence.”

This semester, Seth, a senior international relations and criminal justice double major aiming for a career in law, is taking his LSATS. He’s prepared like a true traceur, examining the results of each practice test as thoroughly and repetitiously as he would one of his breathtaking jumps. The diligence breeds not only skill, but confidence, as essential to confronting a test that will determine your life’s future as it is a gap between buildings high over New York City.
Ilan Bouchard, a junior international relations major and vice president of GW’s club*, says that as much as discipline, parkour has encouraged his creativity. “In parkour, you go out and interact with everything you go through in your daily life without thinking about how you’re going through it,” he says. “Now, I try to see the boundaries I can break to get to where I want to go.”

Case in point: Bouchard thinks the key to GW Parkour’s continued success is actually strengthening its presence outside the university. “[The club] is a nice way to get the name out and be certified,” he explains, “but we’ve found that there’s just not much structure to accommodate parkour at GW.” College traceurs nationwide sympathize; schools are understandably hesitant to open facilities to teams of amateur stuntmen. Campus police wrote up the GW club at its first session. A lengthy safety audit followed, and now the club can only have official events at Primal Fitness, a private gym operated by Toorock.

Still, Seth thinks that establishing more “official” campus groups is key to “bringing [parkour] in from the underground” in the United States. Toorock adds that the expansion of campus parkour groups can add a “structure without structure,” infusing the movement with talented, open-minded young leaders who can develop parkour’s infrastructure while still preserving its ethos of freedom and creativity.

Seth and Bouchard have both previously jumped off a highway overpass, 20-feet high. They landed it. Obstacles–athletic, academic or bureaucratic–turned into achievements. That’s parkour. Maybe it’s as simple as that.

“When you hit that jump, do that flip, climb that wall, the feeling is amazing,” Seth says. “Why wouldn’t I want that in every aspect of my life?”