You’re facing a wall that’s adjacent to a high ledge with an overhanging pipe in between and you need a quick escape. This is a perfect moment to break out those parkour skills.
Parkour is the activity of running, jumping, flipping, swinging and moving over, around, through and with any given environment in any given scenario, whether you’re looking for a simple workout or a way to escape in a less-than-likely situation of imminent danger.
“Anybody with a body can do it. The thing I love most about parkour is that, as long as you have a body and you take care of it, you can do it,” said Domenic Briles, 16, a trainer at Loveland’s Apex Movement who has been practicing parkour for around three years.
Despite its reputation as a daredevil sport with a high risk of injury, the improvised movement sport can be done by people of all ages, a fact Apex intends to demonstrate on Wednesday. From 2 to 3 p.m. at the Loveland Public Library, the gym will host a parkour demo for all ages.
“Unless you’ve completely lost your creativity as a human, you can do parkour. You will only get better,” said Jesse Clark, co-owner of Loveland’s Apex location.
The gym coaches around 60-70 students, around 20 of them adults, of varying levels of experience. Clark and Briles said even the elderly will find something to gain from the activity.
“Movement restores movement,” Clark said.
Parkour consists of learning to move fluidly over surfaces, whether flat grassy parks or hard, high-rising urban courses. Basic movements like vaulting will be taught at Wednesday’s demo, and anyone older than 8 can participate with the instructors and other parkour enthusiasts.
And while some risks are involved, especially at the more advanced stages of parkour movement, Clark said that safety is a priority, first and foremost.
“We want people to be comfortable with it, but at the same time push themselves,” he said.
A key aspect to parkour is learning individual movements, and to play around with them, adapting them into different scenarios and settings and stringing them together into longer and longer series of movements over a greater amount of obstacles.
Clark has been participating in the sport for around nine years, a self-described dinosaur in the world of parkour, which has only recently been gaining steam in the world of athletics. Loveland’s was the fourth parkour gym opened in Colorado and is one of five Apex locations in the country.
“It started as a hobby, being a reckless kid. As I started getting more into it, the parkour community in Colorado started getting huge,” he said.
Briles enjoys the flexibility of the sport, which for him allows for the inclusion of other genres like Tricking, a type of martial arts with aspects of karate, gymnastics and break dancing.
For both Clark and Briles, other sports weren’t able to keep them interested, didn’t push their physical and mental abilities enough.
They said they’ve found a “biological passion” in the improvised nature of parkour and in the idea that there is always something to learn, always a new hurdle to flip over and always new way to climb.
Contact Reporter-Herald Staff Writer James Garcia at 970-635-3630 or garciaj@reporter-herald.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/JamesGarciaRH.
