Learning how body works, getting over fear key to Parkour It takes Amanda Henry about one second to climb up a 7-foot-high concrete wall.
Sweating in the sun, Henry runs up to the wall, leaps up, grabs the ledge, clings to it with her hands, her legs bent under her, muscles tense as she pushes with her feet, pulls herself up and swings her lower body over it.
Climbing walls, jumping through windows and running along high ledges are nothing new for Henry. Every week she trains in Parkour, a discipline developed by Frenchman David Belle in the 1990s and gaining popularity across the world thanks to YouTube.
“It’s play for adults,” Henry says.
Parkour enthusiasts define their sport as “moving from one place to another as efficiently or effectively as possible,” she says. Internet Parkour videos display impressive physical feats on urban landscapes — men gliding, hurling their bodies across all sorts of concrete obstacles.
Henry says it’s not always that glamorous.
Time out with … Amanda Henry
What is your pre-Parkour meal?
I usually try to avoid eating two or three hours before I train. I’ll train in the evening and have a moderate size lunch that day, and then a larger dinner afterwards.
What’s your favorite sports-related movie?
That’s a hard one. I liked “B-13,” which is the original David Belle Parkour movie.
What is your ritual to get you pumped up for Parkour?
We listen to a lot of loud music at the gym, but when I’m training outside, I have a set warm-up that I like to do to make sure my body’s ready for it. And usually it’s just the anticipation of doing something fun that gets me excited.
How long does it take to learn to do Parkour?
You can learn a lot in your first day trying. And you’re constantly learning every time you try after that.
What’s your biggest achievement with Parkour?
I’ve been very lucky to have been chosen to do some performances with some of the best people in the country, and that’s been a definite highlight. But it’s really the small achievements — mastering something that I’ve been struggling with — that I would say are my biggest achievements.
Where can people go to learn more about Parkour?
There’s a Web site — www.americanparkour.com — that provides a lot of information and connections with local communities so you can get in touch with people in your area. D.C. also has a Web site … that’s dcmetroparkour.info.
“A lot of people are attracted to or put off from Parkour by what they see on the Internet, and I think the Internet does a bad job of showing what Parkour is,” she says. “It doesn’t show the intermediate steps, the training, the failures it took to get that.” Henry, a 30-year-old postdoctoral researcher at George Washington University, lives in Northeast D.C. and trains at Primal Fitness in Northwest, the first Parkour gym in America.
She focuses on keeping her body fit and learning new moves, rather than constant motion or making videos.
“Parkour is, in my mind, about learning how your own body works. So that’s a mental thing,” she says. “And then it’s getting over fears.”
Henry trains two to four times a week, mostly at the gym. She gets outdoors to a park or urban space once every two weeks, she says.
Some days she trains barefoot, because her hands are often more calloused than her feet — “and that seems wrong to me,” she says.
Henry’s goals are to be able to pull off “palm spins” and “wall flips” comfortably. “Palm spins” involve twisting the body over a table or bench below, sort of like an elevated cartwheel. “Wall flips” require running up a wall and pushing off for a flip.
But Henry says Parkour is not about the fancy moves. It’s more about the fun, “the play.”
“I always liked climbing on stuff, climbing on trees,” she says. “I remember family vacations out West, and climbing on rocks — the things that parents hate and say ‘Get down from there!'”
A fencer and horseback rider in her undergraduate years, Henry makes a point to be active. That’s how she found Parkour.
“I was looking for something new and different. I was doing a lot of yoga and a conditioning class at a gym, and I was bored,” she says.
She started doing Parkour in May 2007, beginning with a six-week introductory course at Primal Fitness.
Now she’s an instructor.
“I’m more in shape than I’ve ever been,” she says. “It’s whole body. It gets everything in shape.”
She introduced her husband to the sport. Now he’s an instructor as well.
“He was never into organized sports,” Henry says. “Parkour really appealed to him because it’s noncompetitive, and it’s completely self-driven.”
The couple soon will move to Leipzig, Germany, where Henry will take up a research position at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She said one of the first things she and her husband investigated about the city was whether it has a Parkour community. It does.
Henry is unusual among Parkour practitioners in that she’s a woman. She says only two or three women have done Parkour at her gym over the years. A Pittsburgh gym she knows has similar demographics.
But the Washington Parkour community is comfortable, even if she is often the only female. She says her Parkour buddies give her camaraderie, not chauvinism.
“Here in D.C., it’s no problem. You don’t get any kind of looks or comments, or any ‘It’s all right you can’t do it — you’re a girl,'” she says.
