This is kinda crazy, I had no idea Attack of the Show was featuring my blog until a new friend on Facebook tipped me off! Without any notice or help though they actually did a rather fantastic job – meaning they got my name right, not so much about parkour :

Not all that bad! They hit on the newish http://www.parkour-online.com/, Blane’s excellent blog, and a bunch of the stuff I’ve been doing including the RED video shoots with NuRD Productions and the classes we’ve started to teach through the nonprofit Pacific Northwest Parkour Association with the whole thing illustrated through pictures pulled from my Flickr and video from my Youtube! (enough linkage for ya?)

So if you came here through AOTS, welcome to the blog and I hope you enjoy it or it helps in your training It needs some cleaning and re-purposing but I still dig it.

Train hard,
-”One of the best known traceurs in the world” hahaha…

Just noticed this post over on the Chase Jarvis website. Apparently the Seattle Metropolitan Parkour article we did back in April 07 (or at least the photos for it) won a PDN Magazine “Best Of” in the Magazine Editorial section, which also got a New York Photo Festival nomination.

Nice job to Chase, Morgan, and Daetan who did the original shoot (and the excellent Ninja followup)! I’m a big fan of Chase’s blog as he is a ridiculously good photographer who’s very open about his work. Hopefully in the future we can get him out to shoot some more Parkour shots with us, possibly donated to the PNWPA…hint hint….

RoKk, a buddy of mine from Mexico, just posted up an interesting interview he did with me a few weeks ago. He was nice enough to post both an English and Spanish version, check them out on the Monos Urbanos website.

And the future? What do you think will happen with Parkour in the next few years?

I feel almost as if a physical revolution is coming (especially here in the states). Where everyone realizes how lazy of an animal they’ve become and reclaims their natural movement capacities and sense of play, through Parkour! This stuff really isn’t all that new, we just tend to forget when it’s easier to order in and watch TV….

Full interview: English, Spanish

A few months back I was featured in a new project of the UW Career Center called myStory:

The path to discovering one’s passion and/or a career is, for most, far from a linear process. During the college years, experiences both in and outside the classroom shape us in unexpected ways, offering new perspectives and creating new interests that can profoundly impact our future. The UW Career Center’s myStory project is a collection of stories from students just like you. In their stories, we hope you will find inspiration and ideas that lead to your own personal success story! Below our stories of other students who have found success in their career, internship and schooling. Do you have a story for us?

Which is hilarious to me because…well…I’ve dropped out of UW because of my current career (Or how the article describes it, I’m on hiatus). But I can see where they are coming from, my passion for parkour did come to fruition during my time in college and it was an endowment from the school that encouraged me to follow it fully (they probably didn’t expect I’d take it to this level when they awarded it to me though).

The article is actually really good though, and the one I’m probably the most proud of with everything considered. Thanks Cara and Alyce!

There you are, trudging across campus and dragging a 40 pound backpack behind you. It’s just another ordinary day here at the UW, when wait, are you kidding? Did you just see that guy swing over that railing, leap up onto that wall, grab a tree branch and after flying through the air, land gracefully on his feet? What was that?

Well, you likely just encountered Tyson Cecka who emphatically does not trudge anywhere.

Read the full story…

Burien has been talking to the PNWPA a good deal over the past year as they are really excited to bring parkour into the city, and we’ve been trying to figure out the best way to do that with them. One of the first steps is getting more local exposure for the sport…and what better way than to jump over their goverment figures and make lolkours out of them? :

Sorry I just had to! This is actually a shot from a video the B-townblog is putting together from a recent visit that the mayor came out for. Be sure to check them out when the video comes out, and if you’re a Burien native wanting to get into parkour, hop on WAPK and introduce yourself!

Today Tuesday the 18th from 3-4pm on KOMO TV be sure to tune in to the Northwest Afternoon show to see Rafe and I blathering on about parkour, live (ish)! We’re heading down there now to meet the hosts, wish us luck!

Edit: We got them to try some parkour! W00t!

I got an email from a woman who had read about us in the Seattle Met, so I decided to pick one up at the airport before I left. It’s always fun to be reading about something you’re intimately involved with on the plane, makes you feel so special (especially if you are then able to blog about it through your phone before taking off)

I’m returning out of my blog-hibernation to let everyone know I’ll be featured on KOMO TV January the 31st at 11pm on channel 4 in Seattle.

These guys specifically wanted to do this one on just me this time, and we spent four filming sessions hitting a PSCS parkour class, Gasworks, Freeway Park, and UW. They had to have captured some good material in there somewhere, so it’s definitely worth a look.

I helped organize this quick webisode for KIRO-TV’s IWitness video website at UW. Luckily the rain held up long enough for us to demonstrate some fundamentals, a traversal challenge, and parts of the new “Brutalist” gauntlet. Thanks go to Michael Fox, KIRO’s videographer, for putting this all together and doing a great job. Check out his recently learned wallpass at 1:41

Traceurs involved: Tyson Cecka, Jeremy (Raindog), Kellen (Recurve), Christian, Jonathan.

I really like how he simply had us narrate the whole thing, rather than doing the usual media thing and inevitably getting something wrong. On the flipside of that I need more work on my grammar for this kind of thing, some dumb stuff still came out of my mouth

-Link to thread on WAPK-

-Original video page-

The article Athima Chansanchai wrote for the Seattle PI is still one of my favorite articles done in the Pacific Northwest. It was written way back in December 2005 before this blog was even started but I’m surprised I never put it up before.

These are the instincts of traceurs, adoptees of a French-inspired sport called parkour that is part obstacle course, part pushing the limits of urban architectural functionality and all adrenaline-pumping excitement.

Here’s the history on the epic jam we had that day:

It was planned originally as cross-borders jam #2 since we were trying to get some of the guys from Canada to come down. They never came but people from all over Washington and Portland did and it turned into one of the best jams we’ve ever had. Around 22 people ended up showing at Freeway Park, with 3 professional photographers and ton of general camera devices and media people. Having so much media around was pretty fun, but my favorite part was just jamming with all of the amazing people there. Click here to see the photos.

Parkour allows big kids to channel Spiderman with the fearlessness of younger days, balanced with the wisdom of adult discipline and safety. Traceurs range in age from the late teens to early 30s and they typically have some kind of background in gymnastics, martial arts, break dancing or acrobatics. But they can also come in cold, like Sam Wilson, 25, of Mukilteo, who joined a group of experienced traceurs at Freeway Park on Sunday afternoon.

I met a lot of great people that day and forged some very lasting friendships. It’s funny to look back at how far the people mentioned have come. Rafe, Sam, Janine, and I are all now on the board of representatives for the Pacific Northwest Parkour Association. Rafe is now teaching obstacle course classes at the gym he works and has traveled to France to learn more about natural method training. Janine has gone from one of the only women training at that time to one in a growing great community of female traceurs due in large part to her great leadership. Sam has injured himself like fifty billion different times . And I’m…well, explore around and see for yourself.

“It’s a great sport for them to be involved in,” she said, shivering as her sons ran up and down the immense concrete waterfalls at the park. “It teaches them how to use the environment around them and to challenge themselves.”

Read the full article here