Concerning Finns: the Finnish parkour community remains unknown to most of the world but somewhere up north there is a strong and active family of traceurs. A stereotypical Finnish practitioner can be described as quiet, dedicated and with an odd sense of humor (there are many exceptions of course). The long winter period affects the training regime of these cold-hardened individuals as up to 5 months of snow (knee deep) require some adjustments to be made to your training.

A week in Parkour Paradise: 10 Reasons to make sure that you are at next year’s European Gathering  

Over the past four months I have been privileged to have been involved with Steps Youth Dance Company on their major season project of Try Hard. Artistic Director Alice Lee Holland, performance psychologist Shona Erskine and Sofie Burgoyne spent six months conducting workshops in schools across Western Australia to see what is affecting young people in the 21st century.

This article has actually been written for a while but I wanted to post it now to try to give a few rays of warmth to those cold winter days...

So after a few weeks at home I returned to London.  While this was done under the general premise of continuing my research into parkour, I also wanted to attend some key events, most notably Rendezvous.  I arrived in the city just in time to catch the tail end of the instructor’s meeting at Elephant and Castle.

So you can skip to the section(s) most relevant to you, this post is broken into three parts:  1) What are SOPA and PIPA?  2) How these laws will negatively affect the parkour community. 3) What you can do about it.  This post is not meant to be a complete overview of SOPA and PIPA, it is merely meant to inform on the issues that have direct implications for the parkour community.

What are PIPA and SOPA?

After spending a month training with various groups in Italy, I headed to Denmark where I spent another month with the guys from Streetmovement training in downtown Copenhagen and the amazing place that is the Gerlev Sports Academy.

After the travels in South America that I detailed in my last articles, I headed back to Europe to continue my wanderjhar in Italy.  Since I only had a month in Italy, I was able to cover nearly the same geographic span as in Brazil, but did get to work with 3 organizations of particular note.

At their best, parkour events can recharge your passion for parkour and give you new connections in the parkour community. At their worst, they can be boring and dangerous.

At the end of the three weeks that I spent in Chile I attended the  Chilean national parkour Jam that was held in La Concepcion in the south of Chile.  Having spent the previous two weeks in Viña del Mar with Carlos Hidalgo and the “Parkour School”, I decided that it would be a fitting end to the trip to roadtrip down to the event with him.

My breath was coming out in ragged bursts, my cheeks were burning and I could vaguely see the backs of the people ahead of me. Chippa was leading us on the daily morning run, a ritual that was repeated every morning at 7 sharp, in total silence starting from the Trace Facility. The first day, we ran up the road, back, and over a couple of 4m fences before arriving at a 10m long rail for balancing. On the second day, we ran a little further. On the third day, a lot faster, longer and no breaks. On the fourth, we ran along the railway tracks.