Heavy Rain

I find it rather funny that the areas which are held the most unwanted or simply ugly are usually wonderful places to practice parkour.  For instance, we were today training at Merihaka, an area in Helsinki where the main building material is concrete. Its most distinctive feature is that it consists of two levels: one for pedestrians and one for traffic. Simply said, the whole area is gray, causing it to look unaesthetic, repulsive and boring.

But for practitioners of parkour training in an urban jungle like this means being one step closer to heaven. Concrete offers a great grip, it doesn't wobble and you can rely on it. Besides concrete the whole area does have a lot of rails, walls and the vast parking lots offer great places to train despite the weather. So even the rain didn't stop us, although we were all soaked afterwards.

A quite ironic and on the other hand brilliant matter is in my opinion that these areas were originally meant to be as functional as possible, not places where people could come and express themselves trough movement. This is a factor which really drives me during my training: to find new possibilities in buildings meant for something completely else.

This is one reason why I am not a huge fan of parkour parks which are becoming more and more popular all over the world. Although I do understand the authority's point of view; it is more safe to provide traceurs parks, so that they wouldn't harm their environment or other people and parkour parks might activate younger people to move more. Yet it does take away a creative part, the part in which you explore your environment to look for new possibilities and try to think the most effective way in a new environment, because in a parkour park it is all there ready for you: you do not have to use your imagination to figure what you could do.

On the other hand, I have to admit that parks built especially for parkour are usually great places to train and they do offer loads of opportunities. I even would go to a parkour park myself only if there existed one near to me. Because after all to really move in one's environment is at least for me a minor part of my training. Most of the time I and most other traceurs concentrate on one place to train a specific technique. I am not saying that parks designed for parkour would be a bad thing, because they do offer the possibility to express yourself and of course you can always find new possibilities from parkour parks. Perhaps even new possibilities which the planners of the parks would never have thought off.

So perhaps these parks do not make us into mindless zombies who get ready-chewed obstacles. Perhaps we just have to adapt and take our imagination to the next level