Hop, skip and a run

>> John Rooney paves the way
for parkour in Montreal

PARKOUR PLAYGROUND: Traceurs at the Big O...

by ERIK LEIJON
photos by RACHEL GRANOFSKY

Ask anyone what they know about parkour and you’ll probably hear that it involves someone jumping from rooftop to rooftop or climbing the side of a building like a real-world Spider-Man. But to Montreal’s original “traceur” (the name for people who do parkour), John Rooney, the real thing is considerably different from the stylized movie versions seen in the recent James Bond flick Casino Royale, and even the high-flying antics of parkour’s creator, 34-year-old Frenchman David Belle, who is credited with creating the sport when he was only 15.

“That’s what people always see because the biggest stunt in parkour is jumping from rooftop to rooftop,” says the 28-year-old Plateau resident and creator of the all-parkour Web site Pk514. “David Belle is known for doing some of the craziest jumps, and they can be done, but he had to train his body for 16 years to be able to do that. I’ve been training for three years now and people ask me why I’m not jumping from rooftops, but I tell them to be patient since these things take time.”

...make quick descents...

Staying grounded

Rooney, aka drunkm0nk, has been doing various forms of urban sports since 2003. He started by buildering, which is exclusively climbing the sides of buildings. Feeling constrained by only being able to move vertically, he began researching on the Internet until he found that Belle’s invention was precisely what he was looking for. In 2004, he set up Pk514.com in order to find like-minded people. “For a good year, I was practising parkour alone, trying to meet people who were interested in the same discipline as I was. At first, the Web site had only a couple of users and now we’re talking about 1.5 million hits per month.”

Movies like Belle’s District 13 tend to show traceurs running for their lives and eluding gunfire, but the real parkour is more about rules and strategy than wild acrobatics. Typically, traceurs, who run together in a straight line, must go from a designated point-A to a point-B in the shortest amount of time possible. Although climbing and jumping does come into play, traceurs don’t show off their skills just for fun. “What people don’t realize is that parkour starts from the ground,” says Rooney. “Ninety per cent of what we do is on the floor, and very rarely do we start climbing stuff.”

Rooney doesn’t want Montreal traceurs to climb up private property; he is protective of the sport’s image when it comes to local law enforcement because he feels there’s a need to “keep a nice image for future generations.

“Cops know that we’re not up to no good. They see we’re a group of five or six guys, we’re not drinking or doing drugs and we’re dressed in warm-ups. When we run in the streets, we don’t try to scare people; we don’t want to be like skateboarders who go to the park, drink and smoke weed and ruin it for everyone. It’s a new sport and we want other generations to be able to do it.”

...scale sheer walls...

Traceur vision

As the first Montrealer to organize a parkour community, Rooney is also learning to teach parkour to first-timers. He explains that the four elements of parkour—fluidity, speed, efficiency and freedom—are paramount to maintaining the original spirit of Belle’s creation. As important as it is to be in great physical shape, the mental side of parkour is another skill traceurs learn over time. It’s not just about developing an instinct for locating potential shortcuts along the path either; the mental edge of a traceur is being able to understand one’s body. Rooney refers to the training as being very progressive. “You start off by doing two-foot jumps to eventually jumping from 10 feet.

“You don’t start doing random flips; sure, you could jump 1,000 times on concrete, but if your body is not ready for it, in a couple of years your body will be completely shot. It’s important to go at your own level and if you don’t feel it, don’t do it.

“But it’s great to continuously see the progress you’ve made. You’ll walk by a spot and think you can jump from there to there, but a year later you can go back and jump even further or see that spot in a totally different way. Your vision changes and adapts to your new physical skills—we call it ‘la vision du traceur.’”

An unavoidable mistake parkour rookies commonly make is to literally jump head first into difficult jumps or climbs. Even Rooney had six stitches to the back of his head to remind him of the dangers of parkour; he spent two days in hospital after landing on his head during a 15-foot fall. No matter how much he tells them, Rooney says green traceurs always attempt wild stunts early on, and it often takes a year or two before they accept their limits.

...for love, not money.

Commercial free

There is a steady flow of new people interested in the discipline, and with that the commercial potential has become more evident. The number of parkour training videos and message boards designed to teach would-be runners is increasing, and the proliferation of demonstration videos is one of the reasons for the sport’s exploding popularity, But, ironically, Rooney doesn’t encourage spending too much time even on his own message board. He also doesn’t plan on turning his skills and teaching abilities into a business, citing Belle’s mantra of keeping parkour as a sport “for yourself and not for anyone else.”

Rooney plans on retaining the freedom element even as the sport becomes a potential financial goldmine as a competitive sport and in the popular demonstration video market. “Someone could put $10,000 on the table right now to do a competition and I wouldn’t do it. It’s about being free. Parkour isn’t meant to be a competition. And I wouldn’t do a demo because I didn’t have to pay to learn parkour and I don’t want to make money off of it. You don’t learn by watching videos or hanging out on message boards, you learn by going out there and doing it.”