I Managed a monster leap yesterday off one of the cliffs into the sand. I Jumped off that chunk of rock about fifty times at various points before I summoned up the confidence to go from the top, I was there several times over the space of the last week. The sand makes for a surprisingly soft landing. I think this is my biggest leap to solid ground to date. There was a big one I did off the tower in Kinsmen park that I think is comparable, but I don't have measuring tape so who knows. That's not whats important. What's important is that I'm not too old to pull shit like this off, though I must say, I'm alot more strategic and careful about it than I used to be. It's good to have a nice parkour playground nearby. I can only fail at surfing so many times in a row before I get dejected. Jumping off stuff might be dorky, but it's refreshing to do something you're good at every now and then to remind yourself that you don't suck completely at everything. (photo courtesy Jay Fedun, who did an excellent job with Troys peice of shit camera that sucks for action shot because of the delay)

Here's a post I made on the EDPK forums last summer, when I was pretty involved with them. It was a rallying cry, and became sort of a local manifesto on Parkour in Edmonton:

Having thought about it, I've come to realize that seeding the growth of parkour in this city, escpecially for kids who would otherwise be sedentiary, is not only good for parkour, but good for Edmonton. There's a documentary out called "Jump Westminster", and part of it is about how a public school official looking for ways to curb obesity and inactivity in school age children witnessed parkour, and was subsequently inspired to make Parkour an active part of the school cirriculum. It probably won't happen anytime soon, but it would be great to see parkour get that kind of respect here- and the onus is on us. Teaching, demonstrating, and spreading parkour should be as much a part of what we do as is our own training. Toasts thing at the Ledge was pretty cool. And at that level it's not about the biggest or the fastest or the furthest, it's simply about learning how to move, how to coordinate your body, conditioning, and physical confidence. Sometimes I wonder if it should be more about teaching kids or teaching adults. Kids have a natural tendency to run, jump, and climb on everything they see. Their parents have a natural tendency to say "hey, cut that out, you're gonna hurt yourself." If you can show to parents that this running, jumping and climbing is worth pursuing for its own sake, and not simply misbehavior, they will be far more likely to encourage it, or at least permit it in their children. As much as some of you will hate to hear me say it, Skateboarding is something to look to when trying to understand the growth of a new sport, and how that trickles down to a place like Edmonton. A few years ago I read a study that claimed more Canadian kids own skateboards than skates- making skateboarding bigger than Hockey. Though Tony Hawk, skateboarding's most visible and vocal promoter has frequently referred to skateboarding as a 'Daredevil Sport', and it is frequently sensationalized in the media, Parents still buy their kids skateboards for Christmas and let them ride them at the local skatepark. The fact that several public skateparks have been built in this city, and that they are open for anybody to use is surprising. Skateparks are dangerous places- The biggest quarterpipe at castledowns is about twelve feet high. It's not there for looking at, It's meant to ridden on. The ground is hard concrete, there are six foot high flights of stairs meant to be ollied, and 200 pound full grown skateboarders are zooming around inches away from 40 pound kids. The whole place is an accident waiting to happen- yet somehow the skateboarding community managed to convince the civic policy wonks that Skateboard parks are safe enough to be legitimized and built as public places. More power to them- it activly demonstrates that kids have a built in and intrinsic ability to asess risk, and make sound judgement calls in hazrdous environments, and to graduate to more difficult terrain features slowly with time and practice. As much as Edmonton's skateparks foster the local skateboarding community, Edmontons neighbourhood playgrounds are a natural choice as the breeding grounds for future traceurs (it was for me). Unfortunately, playground design has suffered greatly over the years out of litigation fears. Playgrounds are now designed to restrict movement, and to dissuade kids from challenging their own comfort zones. This is tragically ironic in lieu of the aformentioned. Because the new playgrounds are so fricken lame kids are usually completely bored of them by age seven or eight and they move on to other things- like videogames, or bowling. The quartermillion dollar playstructure stands alone in the schoolyard, alone, unloved, and unused. An authoritarian sentinel of supermodernist suburbian dystopia. The playground I grew up playing in would be regarded as a lawsuit waiting to happen by the parent teacher comitees who lobby against the underlying principles of fun, and get all in a tizzy looking for someone to blame everytime some kid skins his knee or sprains his ankle.Baturyn playground was built in the early eighties during a development boom that hit edmonton beginning in the late seventies as a biproduct oil shortages, and rising gas prices. This development boom attracted many world class architects to our city, and for a short time Edmonton was a hub for world class architectural development. Out of this Boom we got buildings like Hub mall,the muttart, and coronation pool.(I've seen pictures of all these places in international architecture publications). On the Downside we also got things like the pedway system, the courthouses, the citadel, and the Art galley. Many beautiful old buldings were razed to make way for these concrete monstrosities: A form of Architectural nihilism designed to be authoritarian and overbearing. Reffered to in Architecture circles as "Brutalism", these new buildings make people feel like termites, and have turned our core into a wasteland. It was before my time, but once Jasper avenue was as vibrant as Whyte avenue is today. Now days nobody goes downtown unless they have to. After working hours the "Arts District" is the sole domain of Homeless persons, Traceurs, and the security guards who shoo us away. At the same time as world class brutalists were busy dehumanizing our downtown core, what was then a new movement in playground design took hold in the schoolyards that were going up in new neighbourhoods like Castledowns and Millwoods. All this came from a group of urban planners who came to Edmonton from California, where a revolution in playground design had taken place. Edmonton was lucky enough to catch the crest of this wave, and many of the playgrounds built at the time were world class, excellent terrain parks that facilitated creativity through movement. Maybe some of you remember the Playground at Hawrelak Park- it was a real centrepeice, a phenomenal playground, and though I've travelled all over canada and parts of the united states, I have yet to see one better, Though it has since been razed and now all that remains is a concrete husk in the middle of a patch of dirty sand. A demoralizing epithet to the condemnation of fun in an overprotective, and surreptitiously paranoid age of litigation and beurocratic improprety. Almost all the great playgrounds of yore have been systematically dismantled and replaced with these brightly coloured mass produced modular arrangements of metal crap that are playgrounds in name and name alone. Most of the friends and aquaintances I have who are my own age are way out of shape, and their bodies are already falling apart. They wince when I jump off something over six feet , and fear for my life when I climb something over ten feet high. They are fish out of water on anything but flat, level ground. I don't have superpowers, I can jump and climb because I've been doing it my whole life, and for me it all started in my local playground. My first big leap was about ten feet, off the ufo shaped structure. When I was nine I Jumped off the tip top of the Twirlyslide,three and one half times my body height, almost as high as Foucans battleship leap in "Jump London" (though into nice soft sand, not steel). All the structures in my playground were connected with a network of balance beams about four inches wide that made for excellent games of sand tag, and over the years I ran these beams thousands of times, and did my first precisions going to and from them. The confidence I have with precisions stems directly from that. During the warm months I was in that playground every recess, and every chance I got after school and on the weekends. During summer holidays from grade three to grade six I'd be out there all day everyday for weeks at a time, usually playing some form of tag, or having chicken fights, or doing stunts. Through elementary school we had this little club called the "Jumping Jets" (Cheesy, I know- it was founded in grade two) We would challenge one another to jump from the boxes to the beams, or from the orange tube slide to the silver slide, or from the pirate ship to the tractor tires. We always pushed each other to do newer, bigger, and more creative things. By the end of grade nine I was doing front flips from fourteen feet off the structure we called 'Endor'. As I grew older I took it to the mountains, and spent many weekends hiking, scrambling and climbing there. But I right up until they tore out the last vestiges of my local playground i would return and repeat all my old jumps and lines, and right up until the end I was clearing new gaps that looked impossible when I was younger. Thanks to the playground I developed a resilience and physical confidence that most people don't have. And I enjoy it, and I confess to being a bit of a showoff sometimes. You get different reactions from people- Some say "Wow", others get angry and say "Fuck, dude, are you trying to kill yourself?" I've sprained my ankles, bruised my heels, I've needed stictches in a few spots, But I've never Broken a bone. (except my nose and my cheek- that's a different story) So parkour is important to me. It's important to be, and to last. And it's important for our small community to work towards the growth of Parkour, especially with kids. And It's very important to ensure that the uninformed don't become the misinformed. We have an Image to uphold, and a message to spread. Over time we'll work towards being more visible. An image in the paper or on the news of us getting big groups of kids and teens out, and teaching them basics, in a responsible and nurturing manner will do alot, and hopefully get people thinking about it the right way.

Here's The peice Fred did on the EDPK crew last fall. It's kind of dorky, but since I'm on the subject I may as well include it:

http://www.helptv.ca/online.aspx?FlashVars=admin/uploads/vid/parkour.flv

Here's the link to the EDPK website, which I was moderating for a while last year. Those kids are still going at it the last time I checked.:

http://www.edpk.ca/forum/

While I'm at it, heres a pic of me doing a huge leap in 2005. The Photo was taken by Dallas Whitley, for a magazine that never got off the ground: