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Parkour springs up in DenverAPEX Movement has grand opening SaturdayEmma MarshallMonday, April 13, 2009 | |
Look up, duck down and hang on tight, Denver, because a new sports sensation, parkour, has landed in downtown Denver.
APEX Movement, at 2250 Lawrence St., held its grand opening Saturday. It is billed as being the world’s largest parkour training facility.
Off the wall entertainment (literally) drew hundreds of people to downtown Denver Saturday afternoon at APEX Movement with jaw-dropping performances and demonstrations. APEX Movement’s founders, Ryan Ford and Matt Marshall, successfully introduced Denver to the sport that has drawn thousands of individuals from all over the world to experience the new type of movement.
Parkour
Parkour can be defined as the art of moving through your surroundings using only your body to propel yourself. It can include running, jumping, climbing and even crawling, if that is the most suitable movement for the situation. Parkour can be grasped by imagining a race through an obstacle course. The goal of parkour is to overcome obstacles quickly and efficiently without using extraneous movement.
“Parkour is something that can benefit everyone,” Ford said. “Aside from the obvious physical benefits, it helps people learn to overcome their fears, set goals and solve problems.”
Basically, hanging from the ceiling, running along walls and flipping through elevated doorways is the kind of entertainment and instruction provided at APEX Movement.
Parkour practitioners are also known as traceurs (for women it’s traceuses), which is a French parkour term.
The facility is packed with scaffolding, a large spring floor, modified gymnastics equipment and walls for running up to the ceiling.
During one of the performance rehearsals, one traceur ran up to the wall to the ceiling and hung off the dusty, metal ceiling support. He made it down in a clever shimmy move.
Guest appearance
Michael Alosi, 28, made a guest appearance at the event. He produced the first full-length parkour documentary called “Point B,” which can be viewed online at www.pointbmovie.com.
“Parkour kind of questions the limits of how we perceive we should move,” Alosi said. “In ancient times, we probably did all these crazy maneuvers. Now we’ve gotten lazy. Basically it can help us remember that we are natural beings and how natural beings move. Just because we’ve set things up a certain way, we don’t have to move that way.”
Parents love it
Sharon Dambly signed up her two sons for another training session during the grand opening. Her sons, Kohl and AJ, have completed three full training sessions and are on their way to becoming experts at parkour.
“I’m happy for these guys, and I really think they’ve got something going here,” said Dambly. “It’s great because I’m not forcing my kids to go. They are completely motivated to come to classes on their own.”
Sat Khalsa, 18, helps instruct classes in Boulder where Colorado Parkour originated. He said he never gets bored with parkour and can’t wait to see it in more movies and commercials as popularity continues to grow with APEX Movement.
“It never gets boring, because you can always do something else,” Khalsa said.
Ford and Marshall
Marshall has excelled from a young age in all kinds of sports. A former state champion gymnast, Marshall also has a background in mixed martial arts, break dancing, wrestling, cycling, wu shu and trapeze. Marshall also has many years experience in coaching gymnastics and martial arts. He graduated from the Metropolitan State College of Denver in 2008 with a bachelor’s degree in exercise science.
Ford has been doing parkour since early 2004 and founded Colorado Parkour during the summer of 2006. As a member of the national parkour team, “The Tribe,” Ford has done performances and other parkour-related jobs for companies such as Mountain Dew, BET, Nokia, Cisco and K-Swiss. Ford also has been featured by media giants such as the New Yorker, Time and ESPN. In October of 2008, Ford traveled to Beirut, Lebanon, with “The Tribe” to run parkour workshops for underprivileged youth on behalf of the U.S. Embassy.
“The most exciting thing relating to parkour that I have done is just being at the forefront of such a young and growing discipline,” Ford said. “I have been lucky enough to be seen as a leader in the development of parkour, and it is my goal to represent and promote it in a positive, accurate manner.”
Looking forward, APEX Movement hopes to extend parkour to every type of person and hopes to apply parkour to sports teams, police officers and military organizations. Ford said there are practical applications of parkour for every kind of person.
Marshall and Ford will hold daily parkour classes this week. For more information, visit www.apexmovement.com.
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