The courtyard outside the University of Michigan Dental School is a physical odyssey of ledges and staircases and L-shaped half-walls. On this first day of fall semester, the
U-M Parkour Club is taking on these architectural fixings in leaps and bounds. Parkour is kids' play for adults using urban turf like handrails and walls, trash bins and benches, as a jungle gym. And when they get going it's sure beautiful to watch.
"Up! Up! Up! Up! Up! Up! Up!" Sanda Mong, an instructor, leads the 15-member group in spring-loaded tuck jumps. They run loops, they crawl down stairs, do the forward crawl, the backward crawl, and squats. And this is just the warm-up. Sweat clouds their tees, though it's darn chilly out here.
The club is free and open to the public. It holds training sessions three times a week, year-round. Parkour's practitioners are called traceurs, and today the ranks include several newcomers and one woman.
"Parkour," Mong, a U-M sophomore, tells me, "is the efficient movement of trying to get from point A to point B as fast as you can, but also safely."
He drills the group in safety techniques, with a hard stress on landing properly - softly, on the balls of the feet, backs straight. Rails, walls, ledges, and benches - there are no padded surfaces out here, and nothing gives (except your body) if you're not careful. Each picks a line on the cement, steps back a few feet, then jumps forward to toe the line - and hold.
"Eventually the line is going to end up being a rail, so you always want to have perfect precise landings," Mong warns.
Vaulting's next; it's magnetic, especially when the circuits start. One right after another, legs scissoring up and over the half-wall, round and round. Some hands barely touch the ledge. Another circuit starts cranking with underbar moves, body weaves through tiered railings.
Doug, our photographer, offers, "You'll know when parkour really catches on because there'll be 'No Parkour' signs next to 'No Skateboarding' signs."
The group has good relations with the U-M Department of Public Safety, says Mong, so it's live and let-live. And they're not leaving any marks.
Next up on the totem pole: Scaling an eight-foot wall at the stately entrance of the dental school's Kellogg Institute. Traceurs jump and grab the edge by fingertip, then pull up to the broad platform on top. After a couple top-outs, the platform gets crowded. For the moment, no one's going down for more. "Everyone's tired," one guy says. "That got hard really fast."
Even with all the landings, I notice there's no standard footwear. Some are barefoot, some wear Vibram Five Fingers barefoot runners. There are parkour shoes, Mong says, but they're not really necessary. "A good shoe is a grippy shoe, and fairly durable." Rock climbing approach shoes are popular.
Free play wraps up the practice. Wen Xin Yang skips from platform to foot-wide ledge, then back again. He dives off and under a mulch-ringed tree and into a forward roll. He
is airy.
Yang shrugs off the butterflies. "It's something that you kind of grow out of."
A Canton High School student, Yang started four years ago with a trampoline and a yen for martial arts. He's been with the U-M club for the last two-and-a half years and practices 8-10 hours a week.
Fortuitously, he's not only been able to
do parkour, but
use it. Parkour helped in a lockout situation at home, where he scaled the wall up to his second floor window. "It was kind of shady," he volunteers.
Yang aspires for "the big scene" – travel and events around the country. And hopefully to widen the eyes of admissions committees. "At least it's something I can, like, prove to colleges." You can't help but stare as he Spidermans up the wall.
"What are you guys doing?" ask some folks on the street. "Par-kour?" they repeat. They're obviously trying the word out for the first time. The name comes from the French "parcours", which translates to: "the way through", or "the path".
Mong runs for a bench, hurdles it, and springs up to a wall cling. Initially attracted by YouTube videos, he's been chasing parkour for two years. "The first day I came, there was a wall over at Dental," he recalls. "I tried for like an hour to get up the wall - eventually I got up."
"I like doing something I didn't really think I could before, but knowing that it's possible to do it," he adds. "It's going past a mental barrier in your mind to eventually overcome that obstacle and succeed."
So
parkour is determination – and what else? Fitness, yes; athleticism, yes; though no one tags it a sport.
"I like to call it more of a discipline," says Mike Metze, a recent U-M grad who formerly headed the club. "A sport implies competitiveness. It's definitely physical in nature, but it's not really competitive other than with yourself."
But you can still show what you know. Last weekend the U-M Parkour Club hosted the on-campus Fifth Annual Michigan National Jam. Again, it's not a contest. There's no point system, no rankings, no prize. Traceurs just come and jam together - from as far away as Seattle and Colorado, Metze says. Now a software developer in the Washington, D.C. area, he returned for this year's event. The jam's Facebook page showed 150 people attending.
Campus is a prime spot for parkour, Metze and Mong agree. "That's why we have a jam here," Mong says. Besides the dental school, other yes-I-cans rear up at the Biomedical Research building, near the Hill Auditorium loading dock, and on North Campus. Or they spout from tree branches.
"Parkour isn't restricted to just urban environments, but [includes] nature as well," Mong says. An otherwise undistinguished tree near the Bell Tower is good for underbar moves.
The club's winter home is the Chemistry Building atrium. It's got stairs, benches, big platforms, lines on the floor for foot placement and jumping exercises – and "pretty good walls", Mong says.
While you can't dodge a rail or ghost your way through a wall, they're not barriers if you put your best foot forward. Mong: "They just look like different paths you can take."
See what we're talking about in "Concrete Schoolyard". It's one campus trip you won't forget.
Tanya Muzumdar is a freelance writer based in Ann Arbor. She is also the assistant editor for Concentrate and Metromode. Her previous article was: "Ann Arbor-on-the-Huron".
All photos by Doug Coombe