Where All the World's a Playground

Aug. 24, 2007 — -- Somersaulting over a railing. Catapulting off a wall. Flipping over a space and rolling as you land on the ground.

For most of us these may seem like reckless stunts, but this is part of a new movement called Parkour. It's a word you won't find in the dictionary, but type it into an Internet search engine and you are bound to find more than 30,000 variations on video-sharing sites.

So what is Parkour? Derived from the French term for route, "parcours", it's a physical art in which one must find the quickest and most efficient way to get from point A to point B, using only the body and an awareness of its limits. Men who practice Parkour are called traceurs; females, traceuses — meaning they trace the route blazed by Parkour's creator, 34-year-old Frenchman David Belle.

It has spread worldwide from Europe to the United States, even parts of Africa, all because of jaw-dropping video clips featured on the Internet. Yet Parkour started with very humble beginnings in Lisses, France, a suburb of Paris, which is now a place of pilgrimage for many traceurs.

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Belle developed Parkour nearly a decade ago as a homage to his father, who was an acrobat and firefighter. The younger Belle was into gymnastics before realizing that he was capable of using more of his body.

"Parkour is an art that can become a sport. For me, a sport has rules, limits, timing, whereas art is something we do to blossom out, to develop ourselves. Basically it's more personal," said Belle.

Parkour is a movement that has grown up entirely on the Internet. Its community almost solely communicates online. Belle doesn't even own a computer, but he has more than 10,000 clips posted on the Web that have influenced admirers all over the world, like Mark Toorock.

Toorock is an American Parkour pioneer and owner of a Washington, D.C., gym. He says Parkour is an art, a sport and a discipline all rolled into one.

"You have to practice it. You have to study it," Toorock said. "You have to do repeated moves over and over and over until you become fluid in those movements."