I wanted to let you all know that we’re undergoing some changes here at Parkour Horizons. Starting today, there will be no more Saturday training sessions until we begin our spring training schedule at the end of March. Instead, Saturdays are being used for organizational meetings, photoshoots, and some informal training. We’ve been making announcements about our Saturday schedule changes on our Facebook page, so be sure to check there for updates.
Also, we are working on some interesting projects and changes to our site and organization; so, if you are interested in making an impact on the future of our organization, and would like to play a bigger roll in the organization, and live in the Columbus area, please let us know by sending an email to contact(at)parkourhorizons.com.
“Être et durer” (to be and to last) - For many of us who train parkour, we train to be healthy–to be strong in body and in mind– for life. While this video may not be explicitly related to parkour, it is related to living a healthly and long life, and I think it is something that you’ll find interesting.
To find the path to long life and health, Dan Buettner, National Geographic Writer and Explorer, and team study the world’s “Blue Zones,” communities whose elders live with vim and vigor to record-setting age. At TEDxTC, he shares the 9 common diet and lifestyle habits that keep them spry past age 100.
Julie Angel has released a lengthy new video that provides a great view into a day’s training of members of Parkour Generations, The Yamakasi and Majestic Force. You may or may not recognize some of the training spots, locales which were integral to the foundation of parkour. It’s a fantastic video and definitely worth taking the time to check out.
Parkour.NET domain name has been first registered on november, 30 of 2001 by Tim. Tim ran Parkour.NET during a while and made it a reference. In 2004, I was running another website dedicated to Parkour. In 2005, Tim wanted to stop maintening Parkour.NET, and proposed to sell it to me. From 2005 to 2008, I worked hard on Parkour.NET to make it the most important web Parkour community. Thousands of Traceurs visited it daily. On June, 13th of 2008, I’ve closed it, and since march 2009, it is back online, but in read only.
Instead of keeping it closed and in read only as it is today, I prefer selling it. If I don’t get an offer I like, I’ll keep Parkour.NET as it is.
The Parkour.net forums used to be home to a large and experienced international community of traceurs. However, the forums unfortunately were closed as a result of a legal dispute, but they still exist in a still a read only format. If you have never visited the forums, be sure to stop by and read through some of the posts. I’m sure you will find a lot of useful information and insightful views on the forums.
For those of you who do not subscribe to Majestic Force’s YouTube account, you will be interested to know that they have added over thirty new videos in the past week! Some of the videos are older, which you might have seen before, but many are new. Entertaining and enlightening to our parkour practice, these videos are well worth watching. Best of all, it does not seem like they’re planning to stop adding new videos anytime soon. I’ve selected a few to whet your appetite, which you can watch below. To see the rest, check out the Majestic Force ADDA YouTube Channel.
The ADD Academy has now translated its website into English.
If you don’t know about the ADD Academy:
ADD Academy: a global educational programme created and developed by the Majestic Force team; Yann Hnautra, Châu Belle, Laurent Piemontesl and with support from Guylain N’Guba Boyeke and Williams Belle (the Yamakasi founders), associated with Bruno Girard.
It is always great to have more opportunities to connect with, and learn from the Yamakasi, so stop by the website and check it out!
You can check out some footage from the Academy in this video:
The Level Two ADAPT Instructor is the standard certification an individual must possess before he or she is capable of teaching the fundamental principles, methods and movements or parkour, either in a class format or on a one-to-one basis, unassisted and unsupervised. A Level Two Instructor is considered capable of teaching the fundamental aspects of the discipline in any situation and to anyone who wishes to learn.
The first Level 2 ADAPT certification is huge news. ADAPT has been in the works for quite a while, and we are excited to see the full coaching certification come to fruition. Also, we are excited to see that Sebastien Foucan attended the certifications. We hope that this is a sign of more cooperation between Foucan and the rest of the parkour community.
For more information on ADAPT, check out this great video from Julie Angel:
SportsNation is a sports-related television program which airs on ESPN2 and ESPNews. It is hosted by Colin Cowherd and Michelle Beadle. It is based on SportsNation, the fan forum and poll section of ESPN.com. The show is typically 60% material generated or suggested by fans, including videos from the internet, athlete Tweets, and online polling.
I would have liked to see parkour taken more seriously, as is usual with most of parkour’s media appearances. SportsNation treats parkour in a silly and demeaning way. But, appearances on major media outlets (like ESPN) will expose millions of people to parkour. Although we may not like how the media portrays parkour, the discipline needs media exposure to grow. Current practitioners need to welcome newcomers and to teach them the true nature of parkour.
MTV has recently announced that it will be turning the program into a series. As we have written before, this is sure to provide a ton of exposure for parkour. The effects, however, remain to be seen. We are excited about parkour getting more exposure, but we are also worried about what kind of image MTV is building for parkour. We will be sure to keep you updated about the development of the show.
It was just announced that Indianapolis will be holding the Midwest parkour jam this summer. Its exciting to hear that the Midwest jam will be only a few hours west in Indianapolis! Few details are available right now, but the date has been set: the weekend of July 16 – July 18. We will be sure to post here when more details are available.
