Podcaster. Writer. 👋 Hello, I want us to go from simply having conversations, to actively creating better conversations — https://craigconstantine.com/ has more about me, and my ongoing projects.
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A Hundred Students at a Temple
Adam McClellan coaches parkour, trains coaches, and runs a business with employees and a handbook. He left a martial arts school for something more genuine. One instructor can know a handful of students; a hundred in a temple need a chain of command, and the distance, he thinks, is inherent. Part of parkour’s appeal is…
From the archives: Nika Jankovic
“You want to be friends with the floor. You wanna caress the floor, you wanna melt into the floor. There’s always you in relation to this thing.” ~ Nika Jankovic
The Risk Nobody Scores
Teresa Vazquez-Dodero took her first parkour class at forty-five, and finds the onlookers’ idea of risk bizarre. They price the next few seconds: the rail, the landing, the ankle. She prices her friends over forty who cannot step onto a bench, and calls that enormously risky. A vault happens at a time, in front of…
From the archives: Sean Hannah
Physical therapy returns you to baseline. Remodeling a joint takes months or years, and almost nobody does it. Sean Hannah talks about doing the movement that hurt you — slow, partial, light — until you can do it fast and heavy again, the three layers pain arrives in, why a knee complaint is often a…
The Genuine Uncertainty
Chris Keighley, a parkour tutor, did a thousand muscle-ups in one day and came out knowing that when things got awful he could keep going. Keighley puts the value somewhere other than the size. A strong man banging out pull-ups he knows he can do discovers nothing; someone falling off a balance for an hour…
From the archives: Colin MacDonald
Somewhere between sculpture and playground sits the parkour park. Colin MacDonald talks about parks like Rose Park in Boise and Penzer Park in Langley, what landscape architecture school is teaching him, why materials matter, how a good park serves people who never train in it, and the distance between the parks he dreams of and…
Hard to Find Walls
A woman climbing a school wall in Seattle told Kyle Koch, who leads people through experiences in nature, that walls were hard to find there. He asked whether she had considered trees. The supply of terrain was never a property of the neighborhood; it belonged to the person looking. When Koch unlocked a tree he…
From the archives: Sam Sweet and Ben Klein
Partner acrobatics has a friendly start — beginners find themselves in poses that look advanced almost at once — and then it gets harder for a long time. Ben Klein and Sam Sweet talk about the fear of being upside down and off-balance, why a strong solo practice can make the partner work harder rather…
Named After the Shoe
Jessi Stensland, a former professional triathlete, has banned the word barefoot from her own speech. It names a foot by what it lacks, and what it lacks is a product. Asked on a trail whether she runs barefoot, she hands the qualifier back: she runs, and you run in shoes. Nothing about the run changes.…
From the archives: Chris Keighley
A thousand muscle-ups began as an argument about whether it could be done at all. Chris Keighley talks about what happened when the argument became an event — what it takes to keep going once the exhaustion sets in, why the people standing around you decide how far you get, and how to find the…
What the Reading Is Against
Put your arm behind your back. What tells you where it is? Adam Dipert is a physicist and circus performer who trains movement in weightlessness, and there the answer stops arriving. The tension in your shoulder is not a fact about your shoulder but about your shoulder and gravity. Remove the background and the reading…
The Countable Part
Michael ‘Frosti Fresh’ Zernow does not defend competition by saying it makes people move better. He argues it makes the practice readable. Basketball can be priced because it reduced early to a countable event: ball goes in hole. Movement has no such atom, so one gets manufactured from whatever a stranger can read in ninety…