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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Playing Down
In his first summer of capoeira, Paul Graves learned from the beginner’s side that you can play with anyone if they are not playing down to you. Playing down and taking care can look alike from outside, since both change the stronger player’s movements. The difference is what that player believes: playing down treats a…
From the archives: Sebastien Foucan
“The purpose of it is liberation and self-development.” ~ Sebastien Foucan
Greens in Hand
André Miller was training clients in a windowless gym and telling them to go to the farmers market. A client would often come back with guilt where the greens should have been. So he realized he had to be the farmers market, able to put the greens in someone’s hand right then. What he changed…
From the archives: George McGowan
“I think that carried over into my style, and then as I progressed it just got more… I was more critical of myself. But it’s my style of training, and I want the line to be—in my eyes—perfect and if I’m happy with it, then that’s all that matters. And having the clip at the…
Nothing Forced
The familiar story says a demanding condition makes you listen to your body. Josh Wit, diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at eighteen, corrects it. The condition forced management, done to the doctor’s instructions. Nothing forced the finer listening he learned slowly: asking, before a precise jump to a low wall, whether he feels off. Forced…
From the archives: Lauren Messeck
“I can engage with the world in this way that I hadn’t done in a while. And it was awesome.” ~ Lauren Messeck
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…