“A good traceur keeps learning to move better, a great traceur keeps moving to learn better.” - Jesse Danger
Click to read whole thing. Short but solid; blog has a lot of good writing on parkour; mentalities, observations, philosophies, etc.
[This is something I feel very strongly about. If more people realized this, I don’t think parkour would have the current sorta-kinda-bad reputation it has now. So please read this. Also, FYPK.tumblr just got a redesign! The CSS for it is available on request.]
“Jumping and running across rooftops in the high-flying sport of parkour…”
“The sport of parkour, in which teenagers run and somersault across roofs…”
“The group of fit, athletic students are practitioners of the extreme sport of parkour…”
News stories with phrases like this crop up all the time. Reporters and journalists call parkour a sport because they just don’t know how else to classify it.
Parkour is not a sport.
“But Alan,” you may say, “It doesn’t matter if parkour is called a sport! That’s just nitpicking points of semantics!”
It does matter. Ideas have power. Words give form to ideas. The way an idea is framed and presented is a critical part of how it’s received by those who hear it. The way we reference parkour is no different. Terminology matters.
Take skateboarding and martial arts. Consider how differently the practitioners of each are regarded. Skateboarders are often seen as irresponsible, reckless rebels who need to grow up. Martial artists are respected, and not just because they can beat the tar out of anyone who doesn’t respect them. They are respected and admired because what they practice goes beyond a hobby, beyond a sport.
Parkour has a lot in common with both skateboarding and martial arts. Parkour is creative movement, like skateboarding; fast, efficient movements, like martial arts; (seemingly) crazy stunts like skateboarding; constant training like martial arts. To the inexperienced eye, it seems that parkour could be a sport, as it has so much in common with skateboarding. I disagree. The differences between the two outweigh the similarities. Let’s explore this topic further.
Reblogging it because people need to read this.
