Parkour: French for “Wildly Dangerous”

THE WHOLE
WORLD’S A GYM

The instructors call Parkour “functional fitness,” because it is useful in everyday situations such as fleeing the scene of a jewel heist or surviving the zombie apocalypse.

I decide to try my new skills in the city. What better way to get out of the gym than to turn the whole world into one large gym?

After kissing my mom goodbye and making sure to have the phone number for Boulder Community Hospital, I head to the CU campus.

I do not know if you have ever gamboled through an institute of higher education, cart wheeling on low walls and somersaulting on the quad, but it has benefits: cardio, fresh air and pretty girls on campus who finally pay attention to me. One girl, in a salmon-colored dress, smiles. I believe she thinks I’m cute. Or maybe she has never seen an exerciser wearing a Superman T-shirt and a helmet, and is pleased that a summer afternoon is being so thoroughly enjoyed by a mentally challenged person.

Yes, I wear a helmet; not a bike helmet, a motorcycle helmet. I am still not convinced this is not dangerous.

The Pearl Street Mall, however, is where I really hit my stride. Not only are there tons of vault-able obstacles—benches, low poles, baby strollers—the people on Pearl Street are more open and accepting of alternative exercise routines. A helmet-wearing dude leap-frogging a metal statue of a frog is not even the tenth weirdest thing on that particular block. Next to the man panhandling while tapping on his PC, or the little dirty lady playing Yankee Doodle Dandy off-key on a child’s recorder—I look positively sane.

NEW GYM

Parkour has grown so popular, particularly among kids, that Apex Movement is in the process of moving into a new and improved gym, to be located at Foothills Parkway and Pearl Parkway. The gym will be three times the size of their current gym, with a giant foam pit to make practicing flips even safer.