Black-diamond jibbing for the pedestrian set! 
From today's Washington Post...
Running Free
By Paul Williams
Friday, February 25, 2005; Page WE56
IT'S A COLD Saturday morning in January, and Jesse Woody is in the middle of what might be a first in the history of interviews.
While answering questions, Woody is casually jumping from handrail to handrail at the top of a staircase across the street from the Rosslyn Metro station.
"It's all" . . . jump, balance . . . "about" . . . jump, balance . . . "confidence," he explains.
Woody, 24, from Orange, Va., is one of the area's top freerunners. Freerunners don't just jog, they flip off walls, leap down staircases and hurdle barriers. Freerunning, also known as parkour (derived from the French parcours d'obstacles, or obstacle course), is one part running, one part gymnastics and one part philosophy. Freerunners believe in turning objects designed to confine people into tools for expressing themselves.
Woody has been practicing parkour for about a year. He says it combines the best aspects of some of his other interests: skateboarding, trail running, rock climbing -- and Eastern philosophy. He's a moderator on the message boards at www.urbanfreeflow.com, the primary Internet resource for parkour runners, where he helps coordinate monthly meets, or jams, in the Washington area. He also runs www.va-parkour.com, a site dedicated to area runners and events.
Woody and several other runners are warming up this morning for a jam. Woody plants a foot against a tree trunk and does a back flip. He vaults a handrail as if it's a pommel horse, then he leaps down a short flight of stairs, lands in a crouch and uses the force of the jump to roll forward over his right shoulder.
"It's about the flow," he says. "The ability to make everything look graceful. It's like water flowing -- you use your energy and momentum to carry you through to the next move."
While the freerunners warm up, people stop and watch them. A young woman asks Woody what they are doing and whether girls can do it, too. Woody gives her a brief description; he says that people often gawk at the freerunners and that invariably a few onlookers ask how they can get started.
"It's something that nobody had ever really seen before, but they can still kind of relate to it," Woody says. "It's close enough to kids playing, but on a larger scale."
Anthony Stevenson, 21, of Fredericksburg, Va., has been practicing parkour for about three weeks. He connected with Woody's group after seeing the documentary "Jump London" on The Learning Channel. The show tracks three freerunners over rooftops and among the city's monuments.
Stevenson said he was intrigued by the sport, and the philosophy behind it, but intimidated because he "thought you had to be like an Olympic gymnast" to do it.
What he found was that the group encourages everyone to work at their own level of ability, and that there is no competition or peer pressure to try anything too daunting. His anxiety quickly faded.
"Within the first 15 minutes, I was no longer nervous. I was just having a great time," Stevenson says.
Woody says newcomers to freerunning usually have misconceptions about the risks involved. Either, like Stevenson, they're concerned about the dangers and demands of the sport, or they're way too eager to try a 20-foot drop off a wall or roof.
"This isn't like an extreme sport. It's much more like a martial art or a discipline, and you don't fight a black belt on your first day out," he says.
In reality most of the basic techniques are close to the ground and will be familiar to anyone who grew up playing on a playground. Woody puts more emphasis on working within your ability to perform techniques better than on who can do the most dangerous or tricky maneuvers.
"Forget about trying to impress people. It's more about trying to do things faster, more graceful, more powerful," Woody says. The key to trying more difficult stunts is to work at it gradually, improving your knowledge of your limits and abilities.
"Anybody can jump off a 15-foot wall," says Travis Tor, 15, of Washington. "It's just having the confidence to do it."
Despite the cold, the group spends several hours running around Washington. They run across Key Bridge into Georgetown, then Metro around the city in search of the right balance of obstacles and open spaces.
As freerunners gain experience, they start to see their surroundings in a new way. The walk to work or daily stroll suddenly presents a chance to leap over a park bench, climb a wall and run across a rooftop. Much of the theory behind parkour lies in the idea that people were once made to run, climb and jump, either after prey or away from predators. While modern cities may seem to inhibit those instincts, they can actually enhance them by presenting a new set of obstacles.
"There's freedom and an art form behind it, and that's what captured me," Stevenson says.
Larger jams, drawing freerunners from Maryland and across Virginia, are held roughly once a month, but there are usually smaller events every week. People get together to practice or run by meeting on the UrbanFreeflow.com forums. Members of the group know one another better by the forum handles than by their real names. Everyone calls Woody "Gears" or "Gearsighted," his moderator name.
While freerunning, founded in France, is more popular in Europe, it's growing quickly in the United States. Woody says that since the discipline doesn't have a magazine or TV deal, the Internet is the best way to plan events and display videos and photos to expand the parkour community. The UrbanFreeflow.com forums had 7,000 members in late January, but more than 3,000 of those had joined within the past month, and the site was getting up to a million hits a day.
The Washington area freerunners often meet in a Virginia gym the night before a jam, helping newcomers learn the basics with the help of gymnastics equipment and mats to land on. And there's no expensive initial investment, no bike or blades or skateboard to buy.
"All you need is a pair of shoes," Woody says. "It's not about mastering a piece of equipment, it's about perfecting the movement of your body."
From today's Washington Post...
Running Free
By Paul Williams
Friday, February 25, 2005; Page WE56
IT'S A COLD Saturday morning in January, and Jesse Woody is in the middle of what might be a first in the history of interviews.
While answering questions, Woody is casually jumping from handrail to handrail at the top of a staircase across the street from the Rosslyn Metro station.
"It's all" . . . jump, balance . . . "about" . . . jump, balance . . . "confidence," he explains.
Woody, 24, from Orange, Va., is one of the area's top freerunners. Freerunners don't just jog, they flip off walls, leap down staircases and hurdle barriers. Freerunning, also known as parkour (derived from the French parcours d'obstacles, or obstacle course), is one part running, one part gymnastics and one part philosophy. Freerunners believe in turning objects designed to confine people into tools for expressing themselves.
Woody has been practicing parkour for about a year. He says it combines the best aspects of some of his other interests: skateboarding, trail running, rock climbing -- and Eastern philosophy. He's a moderator on the message boards at www.urbanfreeflow.com, the primary Internet resource for parkour runners, where he helps coordinate monthly meets, or jams, in the Washington area. He also runs www.va-parkour.com, a site dedicated to area runners and events.
Woody and several other runners are warming up this morning for a jam. Woody plants a foot against a tree trunk and does a back flip. He vaults a handrail as if it's a pommel horse, then he leaps down a short flight of stairs, lands in a crouch and uses the force of the jump to roll forward over his right shoulder.
"It's about the flow," he says. "The ability to make everything look graceful. It's like water flowing -- you use your energy and momentum to carry you through to the next move."
While the freerunners warm up, people stop and watch them. A young woman asks Woody what they are doing and whether girls can do it, too. Woody gives her a brief description; he says that people often gawk at the freerunners and that invariably a few onlookers ask how they can get started.
"It's something that nobody had ever really seen before, but they can still kind of relate to it," Woody says. "It's close enough to kids playing, but on a larger scale."
Anthony Stevenson, 21, of Fredericksburg, Va., has been practicing parkour for about three weeks. He connected with Woody's group after seeing the documentary "Jump London" on The Learning Channel. The show tracks three freerunners over rooftops and among the city's monuments.
Stevenson said he was intrigued by the sport, and the philosophy behind it, but intimidated because he "thought you had to be like an Olympic gymnast" to do it.
What he found was that the group encourages everyone to work at their own level of ability, and that there is no competition or peer pressure to try anything too daunting. His anxiety quickly faded.
"Within the first 15 minutes, I was no longer nervous. I was just having a great time," Stevenson says.
Woody says newcomers to freerunning usually have misconceptions about the risks involved. Either, like Stevenson, they're concerned about the dangers and demands of the sport, or they're way too eager to try a 20-foot drop off a wall or roof.
"This isn't like an extreme sport. It's much more like a martial art or a discipline, and you don't fight a black belt on your first day out," he says.
In reality most of the basic techniques are close to the ground and will be familiar to anyone who grew up playing on a playground. Woody puts more emphasis on working within your ability to perform techniques better than on who can do the most dangerous or tricky maneuvers.
"Forget about trying to impress people. It's more about trying to do things faster, more graceful, more powerful," Woody says. The key to trying more difficult stunts is to work at it gradually, improving your knowledge of your limits and abilities.
"Anybody can jump off a 15-foot wall," says Travis Tor, 15, of Washington. "It's just having the confidence to do it."
Despite the cold, the group spends several hours running around Washington. They run across Key Bridge into Georgetown, then Metro around the city in search of the right balance of obstacles and open spaces.
As freerunners gain experience, they start to see their surroundings in a new way. The walk to work or daily stroll suddenly presents a chance to leap over a park bench, climb a wall and run across a rooftop. Much of the theory behind parkour lies in the idea that people were once made to run, climb and jump, either after prey or away from predators. While modern cities may seem to inhibit those instincts, they can actually enhance them by presenting a new set of obstacles.
"There's freedom and an art form behind it, and that's what captured me," Stevenson says.
Larger jams, drawing freerunners from Maryland and across Virginia, are held roughly once a month, but there are usually smaller events every week. People get together to practice or run by meeting on the UrbanFreeflow.com forums. Members of the group know one another better by the forum handles than by their real names. Everyone calls Woody "Gears" or "Gearsighted," his moderator name.
While freerunning, founded in France, is more popular in Europe, it's growing quickly in the United States. Woody says that since the discipline doesn't have a magazine or TV deal, the Internet is the best way to plan events and display videos and photos to expand the parkour community. The UrbanFreeflow.com forums had 7,000 members in late January, but more than 3,000 of those had joined within the past month, and the site was getting up to a million hits a day.
The Washington area freerunners often meet in a Virginia gym the night before a jam, helping newcomers learn the basics with the help of gymnastics equipment and mats to land on. And there's no expensive initial investment, no bike or blades or skateboard to buy.
"All you need is a pair of shoes," Woody says. "It's not about mastering a piece of equipment, it's about perfecting the movement of your body."
