Talkie Walkie VI – Parkour everywhere

The training is supposed to start at 13.00. When I arrived at 13.10, however, I didn’t see any guy like a stereotype parkourer. ‘God voor dommen, I must be too late,’ I was blaming myself until I noticed a long-hair guy jumping between the railings of a slope. ‘Hoi, are you the parkour coach?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ His answer relieved my guilty feeling of the procrastination. I was actually the first to arrive. He turned around and continued his one-man game. What did he do? It’s too complex to explain the circumstance. Thankfully this clip (just the part from 0:30 to 0:54) will help you understand what happened then. My jaw dropped by his performance and I couldn’t help but ask: ‘do you play other sports?’ ‘I want to learn Kong Fu, but it’s too expensive… I learned Judo, but I stopped,’ he had a strong accent from nowhere. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘I don’t like the competitive sport. Parkour is different: you don’t have to prove you’re better than others, you just face yourself,’ his wit provided me a new insight to parkour. After almost one hour’s waiting, a ramshackle training team was finally shaped: a long-hair German leader, a Dutch girl in black T-shirt and Capri pants, a skater boy from Arnhem with African style curly hair, and a Chinese rookie. When the training finally kicked off, we began with the simple warm-up. But soon the Dutch girl and I quit: she still suffered from the previous injury of her legs, and I just found the following exercises too difficult to continue: they started some stunts like the spider-man crawl rather than normal exercises, which was beyond the definition of ‘warm-up’ in my dictionary. In fact being an audience made me more comfortable: I could take pictures, observe the reactions of the pedestrians or learn how those two guys focus and enjoy themselves. I didn’t stay till the end as I had to leave at 15.00, when they were still doing the warm-up. It’s pity I didn’t acquire any parkour skills, but I didn’t return home empty handed – at least now I know how to crawl like a spider-man. Vid of the Week: Guido shows us that we can parkour everywhere in Wageningen.