Le Parkour de la Portland The French sport of Freerunning hits even Maine BY SARA DONNELLY

The wall Chris Levesque has chosen this day to run up is at about 10 feet tall. It’s made of concrete blocks and lines the wide staircase connecting downtown’s Canal Plaza to Union Street in Portland. On a recent Sunday, Levesque faces the wall dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a red T-shirt emblazoned with his nickname: "Bopher." He sizes up the height of the obstruction from about 10 feet away, waiting for the cars to clear the Key Bank ATM behind him. His girlfriend sits on a nearby curb and presses her chin into her palm, watching. He takes two deep breaths and charges. Leaping off the ground, he propels himself upward in three fluid steps, his sneakers scraping the cobbled surface of the blocks as he scrambles. In the blink of an eye, he’s three-quarters of the way up the wall. Levesque slaps his palms on the top ledge and pulls himself up the last few feet. He stands on the edge briefly, then casually jumps down onto the mezzanine.

It’s that fast, it seems that easy, and Spiderman couldn’t have looked any smoother.

Levesque’s girlfriend stands and saunters over to him. She smiles. She points out the pink scrapes on his forearms from the wall climb. He shrugs.

"Lindsay’s accepted the fact that I might die young," he says sarcastically.

Levesque may move like a superhero, but he’s a sportsman at heart. You can call him a Parkourist. Or a traceur. Or a freerunner. All mean the same thing — that Levesque practices a new urban sport called Le Parkour, which after 15 years has spread all the way from its birthplace, the middle-class suburb of Lisses, France, to cities and towns all across the US.

The name Parkour is a bastardization of the French "le parcours d’obstacles" meaning "obstacle course"; Parkour is also known as "freerunning" or PK. The sport is part martial art, part artform, and part metaphor for life; the goal is to navigate urban obstructions in a graceful, and often acrobatic, way. If you come across a fence, you climb over it. If you pass a railing you pendulum swing around it. Even walking backwards along a curb could be considered Parkour, if it’s executed well.

The most advanced Parkourists jump between rooftops in a single bound and execute handstands on ledges more than 100 feet high (no one really recommends this, though, so don’t get any bright ideas). There are a handful of basic moves, but beyond these, it’s up to the Parkourist to decide how to "flow" gracefully through their environment. When a series of techniques are combined one after another, it’s called a run. In Jump London, a 2004 British documentary which helped launch the PK craze in the UK, Parkour co-founder Sebastien Foucan and two other French traceurs engage in a marathon run over some of London’s most famous landmarks.

Sound like the grown-up version of what children do in the playground? That’s no mistake.

"A big part of what makes Parkour fun is it’s natural," says Mark Toorock, one of two US administrators of the Web site www.urbanfreeflow.com. Urbanfreeflow was founded in 2003 by 13 traceurs, all in their twenties. It is one of the more extensive Parkour Web sites and includes amateur and professional video, Parkour event listings, and regional message boards.

Jackie Hai, an 18-year-old female traceur from Lexington, Massachusetts, says navigating an environment as a freerunner is like tapping into the primitive. She believes kids who hang from the monkey bars or walk on curbs instead of taking the sidewalk are practicing the basics of the sport.

"They’re doing the essence of Parkour," Hai says. "It’s a disregard for what you’re supposed to do. It’s the childlike want to play around. It’s a natural desire in all of us, I think."

The two friends, David Belle and Sebastien Foucan, who "founded" Parkour in Lisses, got their start in the late 1980s, looking, as teenagers will, to kill time in a town that didn’t offer much in the way of entertainment. Both athletic by nature, Foucan and Belle began by balancing on low posts in a downtown park and hopping between them — this became the PK technique "precision leaping." Then they balanced on rails, vertically like a cat — the "cat balance." Then they learned to leap from higher spots and roll on the ground to diminish the impact — the all-important "roll."

Eventually, what was once screwing around downtown evolved into a sport with a distinctive philosophy — the "path of the traceur" as Foucan calls it, or simply, "the Way."

Foucan’s Web site, www.foucan.com, details the meaning of "the Way":

"The Way is the path of silence.

Cut across town quietly at your own speed.

Concentrate on footwork, your touch, your own sensibility.

Look for cat-like silence and you will find the path . . .

This is the Way."

Today, Toorock estimates some 20,000 people worldwide have adopted Foucan and Belle’s "Way." Parkour is most popular in the UK and France, where many of the most advanced traceurs live (including Belle and Foucan). The sport is relatively new here in the US. According to Toorock, there are about 5000 traceurs in the country, although keeping track of the exact number is difficult because of the newness of the sport (some estimates peg the total as low as 450).

Since the scene is fragmented and is only somewhat organized by posts on message boards online, Levesque isn’t absolutely sure how many traceurs live in Portland. But since he hasn’t seen anyone around doing it, and since he hasn’t yet gotten any local feedback from his Web post on a proposed group practice, or jam, he’s planning in Portland in August — he’s pretty sure he’s the only one.

But he’s wrong.

Nate Dingley and Luke Filipos, both 18, are just getting the hang of Parkour and while they don’t practice as religiously as Levesque, they can still whip out a good roll when necessary. Dingley, who’s been practicing for about a year, and Filipos, who’s PKed for two, get together every now and then with four other friends from Portland to practice techniques around town. They first learned about Parkour the way most US teens have — they read an article on it in a national publication. Then they googled Parkour online. They found urbanfreeflow.com, checked out a few moves, and started practicing.

"It’s kind of an escape in a way," says Filipos. "It’s about challenging anything that would normally impede where you’re going. There are times, when you’re in the middle of a good jump, it feels like you’re flying."