Cre­at­ive Com­mons photo by Alex­an­dre Fer­reira on Flickr

UPDATE: NZ Parkour Asso­ci­ation estab­lished; offer­ing classes in Wel­ling­ton.

 

Ever been wan­der­ing around town and seen a group of young­sters behav­ing like a bunch of naughty mon­keys? Whaddya know.. they’re prob­ably doing parkour.

Parkour (some­times abbre­vi­ated to PK) or or “free-run­ning” or l’art du deplace­ment (“the art of dis­place­ment”) is an activ­ity with the aim of mov­ing from one point to anoth­er as effi­ciently and quickly as pos­sible, using prin­cip­ally the abil­it­ies of the human body.

Foun­ded by Dav­id Belle in France, parkour focuses on prac­ti­cing effi­cient move­ments to devel­op your body and mind to be able to over­come obstacles in an emer­gency. It is also prac­ticed by many as a form of enter­tain­ment or as a pas­time.

As I hin­ted above, there’s a thriv­ing parkour scene in Wel­ling­ton; espe­cially in and around the urban/recreational areas of the water­front and Civic Square.

Here’s a couple of clips of some pretty shit-hot loc­al prac­ti­tion­ers:

Luck­ily our guys are a bit more skill­ful than this lot of unfor­tu­nates:

And so on and so on. There’s much more where that came from (You­tube, of course).

And if you’re keen to try it out, per­haps you could keep an eye on Meetups for parkour in Wel­ling­ton.