PARKOUR! This week, as you’ve already guessed, I will be talking about the pure awesomeness that is parkour. Yeah, you might say to yourself “that’s actually not a sport” or “you’re not even doing a sports review blog anymore” but all I have to say to that is that anything can be a sport nowadays and that makes this a blog review on a sport, so chew on that my fellow classmates. If you wanna get technical with me, the definition of a sport is “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.” Parkour obviously involves physical exertion and skill and is used in competition and entertainment, so boom, you’ve been lawyered (How I Met Your Mother). But enough of that, let’s talk about the most ridiculously awesome thing that god has ever bestowed upon this earth.

Parkour is officially defined as “the activity or SPORT of moving rapidly through an area, typically in an urban environment, negotiating obstacles by running, jumping, and climbing.” It is a sport for the superior humanoids of planet Earth living among us mere mortals. If you have ever done parkour, or seen people do parkour, you know first hand all the crazy shit that people can somehow do. I’ve personally never done real parkour, but I’ve honestly always wanted to try–it just looks so cool the stuff people can do.

As for the rules of parkour, there obviously is none, but there are some unofficial rules that people should try to abide by when doing parkour. You should respect the training environment i.e. the buildings and platforms you are performing your awesome parkour on, manage any and all risks so you don’t hurt yourself, perform efficiently instead of stylistically (although this is a stupid rule because the whole point is too look awesome as your being awesome), and to maintain flow meaning try not to have any stops while doing parkour and smoothly transition from stunt to stunt. Again, there are no actual rules for this sport these are just guidelines so you can do whatever the hell you want, just try not to hurt yourself in the process.

Now if you have ever seen The Office, which I’m guessing you all have unless you are a terrible human being, you can recall the episode where Michael, Dwight, and Andy try to do parkour around the office (shown above). Well throughout my life, I’ve watched this show a multitude of times, and the first time I watched this very episode I watched with a group of my friends. After our viewing, our idiotic middle school brains decided to go try and do some parkour (and yes we did say parkour every time we did a stunt like they did in the show). Well long story short, one of my friends ended up breaking his arm because he thought he could run up a wall and do a back flip off of it. We all kind of gave up after that setback.