Thomas has written up a great little post on how some of the original traceurs in Lisse used to train and how training with them changed his life.

All of these guys had been through some much more intense training than me, and there was in Lisses a taste for very hard work. They were all very good at finding a sneaky way to make every exercise, every jump even harder. They did it as a game, creating little “fun” challenges all the time. The emulation in the group was the best I’ve ever seen. If you didn’t train your ass off, you were called lazy !

It offers a lot of insight into how parkour in Lisse was before all the arguments and commercialization and splits that we see nowadays. Fortunately, reading his post reminded me of a lot of the same experiences I had when I was first learning even though I started many years after he did on a different continent entirely.

I’m sure many things will be changing when parkour enters the mainstream, but I’ve always believed that the true spirit of parkour will live on forever in the dedicated people (like Thomas) who let it enter their being and change them forever. I’ve been very lucky to be able to travel a bit and meet some of these amazing traceurs and the communities around them, and it’s definitely not a spirit that can be broken easily.

*On another note I’ve added a blogroll to the sidebar where I’ll be adding sites I visit and the blogs of traceurs that I respect a great deal to.