Le Parkour de la Portland (continued)
	Getting started So you want to flow like a superhero? Jam like Jackie Chan? Well, hold your horses, kiddies. Here are a few things you should know before you hit the ground running: Gear: Yeah, technically you don’t need gear to do Parkour, which is part of the beauty of it. But let’s not pretend you can nail a precision jump on stilettos, either. Get yourself a pair of sneakers with good treads. Portland Parkourist Chris Levesque warns against kicks with anything other than rubber soles (the plastic decorative stuff in the arches of some sneakers could send you skidding off a rail). Parkour founder Sebastien Foucan encourages beginners to wear kneepads and elbow pads. Work Out: Parkour is a physical sport and if you’re not in shape and in tune with your body, you could make a stupid mistake and hurt yourself, or worse. Most traceurs do a little warm-up before practicing (like jogging or some sit-ups to get the blood flowing) and all of them say stop when you’re feeling fatigued. Pushing yourself to execute that last move could result in a misstep and an injury. Buddy Up: Check out Web sites like www.urbanfreeflow.com and www.meetup.com to meet other traceurs who can help you hone your skills and rein you in when you’re about to try something you can’t handle. Start Small and Go Slow: The goal here is not to impress your neighbors, it’s to flow gracefully. Learn how to consistently nail the small leaps and rolls before progressing to the tougher stuff. Focus on technique rather then flashy moves. Don’t Be a Punk: Traceurs pride themselves on respecting property. Don’t mess around on a private lot and don’t damage something that isn’t yours. If you’re asked to leave a spot, flow on without hassle. Don’t Be an Idiot: Don’t jump between buildings, please. According to Mark Toorock, a professional Parkourist and an administrator of urbanfreeflow.com, there are only four traceurs on the planet who can leap buildings, and we’re willing to bet you’re not on the list. _SD

Dingley and Filipos represent the majority of traceurs worldwide — teenagers, often boys, with access to the Internet, an unending supply of energy, and very little fear of death.

The message board on urbanfreeflow.com is a clearinghouse for these young traceurs, most of whom hope to hook up and practice with a crew and eventually organize a meeting to show off their skills. On urbanfreeflow, traceurs can post messages on regional boards to find out who’s practicing when and where. While the Maine board is nearly empty (Toorock can only think of three registered Maine freerunners) the Massachusetts board tends to be busy enough during the school season to be worth checking out, with somewhere between 10 and 25 regular visitors, according to Toorock. These two dozen Boston traceurs make up a strong up-and-coming scene, he says.

Yeah, 25 traceurs qualifies as a scene. Cut them some slack, it’s a new sport.

The biggest PK scenes stateside (and the busiest regional PK message boards on urbanfreeflow) serve New York City, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, says Toorock — cities which have about 100 traceurs each.

Traceurs in the Boston area, the closest PK hotspot to Portland, have aliases like "Ductmonkey," "Triggerhappyjak," and "The Only Upriser." The traceur scene in Boston is unofficially headquartered at the campus of Northeastern University because many of the kids who do it in the city attend the school. Which might explain why the urbanfreeflow message board is peppered with liberal arts-inspired earnestness — Upriser tags each post with a quote from philosopher Iris Murdoch: "Our creative struggle, our search for wisdom and truth, is a love story." Another traceur, called "Krazydiaperboi," entertains a minimalist bent - the young freerunner from Canton finishes his frenetic, nearly incomprehensible posts with the phrase "You live. You flow. You die."

Toorock says the Internet has always been an important means of communication for traceurs looking to jam, but here in the US, it’s particularly crucial.

"The US scene is a lot more spread out than a lot of other scenes; in the UK you’ve got much more participants in a country that’s a fraction of the size [of the US]," he says. "In the US, it’s more difficult to get teams together. You need the Internet, you can’t just go somewhere and find someone doing Parkour."

Despite the inherently extreme nature of a sport where leaping over walls and flipping around rails is the norm, the Boston-area traceurs on urbanfreeflow.com seem decidedly gentle. They go out of their way to give strangers rides to jams, they offer up encouragement and dish about injuries, and many of them put things like school, girlfriends, and trips to the Museum of Science above Parkour.

But at the professional level, the world of Parkour is often not so sweet. Belle and Foucan, the childhood friends who created the sport, parted ways soon after Foucan shot a famous series of Nike ads in 2002 (you might have seen them — he was running from a chicken). Belle has since had limited success marketing the sport through a fledgling international Parkour association and Foucan has formed a splinter group called the Taoris, who practice Parkour as a philosophical calling in the Eastern tradition. According to Toorock, few professional Parkour groups manage to stay together for any amount of time — the elite freerunners are plagued by infighting and competition for the few lucrative endorsements which are available.

For the time being, though, the owners of urbanfreeflow.com have avoided such pitfalls. In January, urbanfreeflow scored a key endorsement with Adidas shoes for an amount which Toorock declined to release. The site’s professional PK team has traveled around the world performing the sport for money. To date, the site has 11,000 registered traceurs internationally.

Here in Portland, amateur traceurs Dingley and Filipos don’t worry much about the politics of the whole thing. They just think its cool there’s a name for messing around and acting like a jackass. And the fact that there’s a whole philosophy that goes with it? Hell, even better.

Their biggest Parkour annoyance to date has been being ousted from a couple of prime spots in Portland — near the People’s Heritage Bank in the Old Port by the police and from an alleyway behind an office building on Union Street by office workers.

"This one guy kept knocking on his window at us," says Dingley.

Levesque can relate — he’s been ejected from a couple of his favorite spots in Portland, too. All three stress that real traceurs respect property and don’t damage anything. And when they’re asked to leave, they leave — no trouble.

Back at the stairwell in Portland, Levesque takes a break from "sessioning" the site. He’s done the wall climb, a Kong-vault over a high wall into a roll, and a couple of elegant precision leaps. His girlfriend has watched patiently from the sidelines, although she’s getting chilly and is dropping hints hoping Levesque will wrap things up soon here.

Levesque looks up the stairwell. He has a thin, wiry body which lends itself well to "monkeying around," as he calls it. Despite throwing himself into walls, up walls, and over walls for the past 20 minutes, he doesn’t seem particularly winded.

"Parkour is appealing because it’s not boring," he says. "The day-to-day activities of so many people — it’s just like a bunch of robots walking around.

"That’s why it’s so freeing. A lot of people just walk up and down these stairs but I can do so much more."

If Levesque can find traceurs locally and convince those from out of town to migrate for a weekend, his planned August jam will be the first ever in the city. Though there has been some sign that the sport has registered on the local cultural radar — the 2004 Festival of Cultural Exchange in Portland featured a Parkourist from Boston — Parkour remains largely alien to the streets of Portland and very much a foreign language in nearly all other Maine locales. This bodes well for traceurs looking to experiment under the police radar, but can make it tough to jam and hone skills.

Here in Maine, the lack of a cohesive Parkour community is currently the biggest obstacle to flow over.

Sara Donnelly can be reached at sdonnelly@phx.com