by Joel Warner

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

—Leonardo da Vinci

Ryan Ford, Ben Norskov and Rithi Son stand above the top row of seats at Red Rocks Amphitheater, dressed in T-shirts and wind pants. In the amphitheater below, other visitors are using the warm spring weather as an excuse to burn calories—running up and down the stone seats, executing crunches and calf stretches. Ryan, Ben and Rithi are here for a workout, too—but one which few people have likely seen before.

Ryan commences the practice by vaulting onto a stone wall, running down the narrow ledge and leaping into midair, sailing through the atmosphere straight toward the stone facade of a nearby one-story building. His hands grab the building's overhang and his feet connect loudly with its facade, leaving him looking like Spiderman hanging off the side of a skyscraper. He scrambles up onto the building's roof and looks down at his companions.

Nice cat leap.

The trio makes their way down to the amphitheater stage, but none takes the stairs. They vault over fences, slide down metal railings, clamber up walls and leap off eight-foot drops without a moment's hesitation. Among the small crowd at Red Rocks, the spectacle causes mouths to unconsciously flop open in a mixture of bewilderment and admiration.

Once on stage, the three are in constant movement, like balls of kinetic energy. They balance themselves on narrow railings and leap into the air. They run up and down the undulating red rock face comprising the back wall of the stage. Ryan throws himself at a chest-high railing, grabs the metal bar with both hands and swings his legs through his arms, vaulting himself upward so he can grab an overhanging bar. He hangs there for a moment, then does a few pull-ups.

A young boy near the stage looks stunned.

"What are you trying out for?" he asks the three blurs of motion.

"Nothing," one of them responds, when he stops to catch his breath.

What they are doing, however, is practicing parkour—which may be a sport, may be an art form or may be a way of life. Sometimes referred to as freerunning, parkour incorporates elements of martial arts, break dancing, skateboarding, gymnastics and navigating military-style obstacle courses. While parkour is not about to be featured at the summer X Games, it's gaining speed across the country—including Colorado—and when it comes to parkour, speed is all you need.

"Basically what parkour is is to start at any given point and flow through your environment. You don't want anything to get in your way," says Ryan, in between vaults. "Above all you want to move fluently, efficiently and with creativity."

Ryan, 18, with dark skin and very short hair, should know—he almost single-handedly launched parkour in Colorado.

"It's always kind of been in me," he says. When he was younger, he was always climbing trees and scrambling over rocks. In middle and high school in Golden, in between working his way to class valedictorian, Ryan played soccer, tennis, basketball and football. He also found time to help found a group called the Rowdies, sort of like a co-ed cheerleading squad for the school basketball team. About a year and a half ago, while researching new moves to psyche up the crowd, Ryan came across a website called www.urbanfreeflow.com. The site listed all sorts of moves he'd never heard of before—and introduced him to the world of parkour.

As Ryan learned on the website, parkour started in the 1980s in Lisse, France, with a couple of kids messing around, jumping over fences and running around playgrounds. Through the direction of a few forward-thinking participants like Sebastien Foucan and David Belle, soon the child's play evolved into something much more evolved and structured. The discipline was named parkour in reference to the complicated obstacle courses built in the early 20th century by George Hébert, a legendary French physical-education expert who argued that exercise should work out not only your body, but also your mind and your spirit. For those who practice parkour, or so-called traceurs, there is no competition or goal.

"The most fundamental thing to parkour is to keep moving. Keep moving, and by saying that I mean moving efficiently, toward a goal which doesn't necessarily have to be goal for a reason, but moving with purpose. It's getting to somewhere," says Mark Toorock. "It's an art of movement. And the way I describe it is using the urban environment as an obstacle course, as a sort of playground, and at the same time as your gymnasium."

Mark is a U.S. member of Urban Freeflow, a British group of traceurs who've probably done more than anyone else to further the popularity of parkour. By incorporating elements of professional athletics into parkour—high-end video shoots, logo designs, publicity-surrounded performances—over the past two years Urban Freeflow has taken parkour out of the French countryside and across the globe, including into the United States.

Compared to some countries, U.S. parkour is still in its infancy. Mark estimates there may be between 500 and 600 regular traceurs across the nation.

"I think in the U.S., while we tend to think we're free-thinkers, we're not," he says. "We tend to follow examples. We tend to color within the lines. And parkour is definitely something that says, if there's a line there, maybe there's a way to get around that."

In Colorado, Ryan is doing his part to teach as many people to color outside the lines as possible. A year ago he struggled through his first parkour practices alone at Red Rocks and at local playgrounds. But then people started coming out of the woodwork. This past October he launched a website—Colorado Parkour, or COPK, at http://sports.groups.yahoo.com/group/COPK/—and started organizing "jams," get-togethers where burgeoning traceurs could practice their moves together. At one of the most recent jams, held at Skyline Park in downtown Denver, about 25 people—and a film crew—showed up.

"It's getting really big," says Ryan.

Part of the attraction of parkour is that you don't need to throw down a wad of cash at Gart Sports before you start—all you need is a pair of decent $25 cross-trainers, and you're ready to go. And while most parkour runs are comprised of combinations of vaults, jumps, cat leaps and landings, there are no specific moves you have to master to become a traceur. While the media likes to play up killer roof jumps and flashy flips, traceurs emphasize that most of the time, such antics are the antithesis of parkour—what's the point of doing a flip if there's a more efficient way to overcome an obstacle?

"Oftentimes people are hung up on the idea that if you aren't doing this certain jump or this certain vault, it's not parkour because it is not strictly defined," says Mark. "But the essence of parkour is when you're moving and not thinking about it. You just do it. When you come to an object, you really don't have to think about the best way for you to get around it."

Of course, traceurs still master some pretty cool and technical moves, such as the tic tac, king-kong vaults, wall runs, cat balances, palm spins and rail precisions. They practice these basics over and over, not only so they become part of their natural repertoire of movement, but to overcome the biggest obstacle they face—their own fear.

"I think it teaches them to question, to explore: 'What can I do with this space, what can I do with myself? Why are these limitations here? Why do I walk around a railing when I can jump on it? Why do I avoid jumping off a ledge two feet high when I physically can?'" says Mark.

There's another mental element to parkour. Traceurs say they've learned to see their surroundings in a whole new light. Their world is one big playground.

"That's what parkour does to you in the city. Once you've jumped a rail, climbed up a wall, you will never, ever see the city the same way again. It will not be the confining road map that it used to be," says Mark. "You don't see obstacles, you see opportunities."

Traceurs say parkour is extremely safe, nondestructive and healthy—and it looks like people are starting to agree with them. Urban Freeflow's traceurs are now sponsored by Adidas and Nokia and have produced major performance videos, high-profile television ads and are even supposedly appearing in a big-budget film. There's talk of parkour parks and videogames. And while all this may be happening a long way from Denver, people like Ryan are working to make sure Colorado becomes a destination for traceurs.

Right now, however, Ryan and his buddies Ben and Rithi are still enjoying Red Rocks. Ryan stands in the center of the stage and looks at the rails, overhangs, walls and rocks around him. He looks at his friends and smiles.

"Let's flow."

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