LEARN MORE ABOUT PARKOUR American Parkour Parkour of North America Video of Jonathon Santana and his crew doing wall flips Ryan Ford's crew Duncan Germain's video Xin Sarith Wuku, 'American Ninja' Parkour.net, generalize news

But these aren't superheroes. They're everyday (mostly) guys practicing the art of parkour and an offshoot known as free running. Sprinkle in a little Spider-man, ninja and Tony Hawk-style skateboarders (without the boards), and you've got the picture.

Parkour is the art of moving through one's environment in the fastest, most efficient way possible. If there's a bench, a traceur, as practitioners are called, will jump over it. If there's a wall, he'll run up and scale it. Many traceurs also practice street running, in which they add tricks such as flips and twists.

Originating in France, parkour — the art of displacement — is migrating from Europe to the USA, thanks to a growing number of Web videos and forums, though action scenes in Casino Royale and Live Free or Die Hard didn't hurt. YouTube and MySpace are full of popular videos showing young men doing the seemingly impossible.

This week, Jonathon Santana has the top MySpace video, showing him and two friends running up a wall, then flipping back, Matrix-style. Parkour, says Santana, 21, a college student in Jacksonville, "is a really good, healthy way to stay focused and in shape."

It also instills confidence, much in the way martial arts do, says Duncan Germain, 21, a college student from Burlington, N.C. "You get a real sense of freedom and accomplishment that you don't if you're just running on a treadmill in a gym."

When Germain first started parkour, he had no local peers, so he turned to the Internet. "YouTube was critical in my success at the sport," he says.

But as much as he loves online videos — he recently posted his own — he and others "fear the unbalanced videos, the ones that show nothing but the extreme stuff like people jumping from skyscraper to skyscraper off a 15-foot roof and landing," he says. "Somebody watching the video for the first time thinks that's all there is to it. And they go out and try to jump off the roof."

In reality, parkour is a gymnastic discipline that requires hours of daily training and often years of practice. When done right, it can be relatively safe, its practitioners say. But lose focus and face the consequences.

"I was trying to show off and did a back flip off my school," says Santana, who landed badly from the two-story drop "and cracked my fibula in two places."

Ryan Ford, 20, of Boulder, Colo., says he thinks it can be "safer than most other sports. I played football in high school, and I got hurt more in football. In parkour, you always have to be 100% focused and confident in your own abilities; you control everything you do."

Parkour and street running are so new that many emergency room physicians are unaware of it. Michael Bishop of the American College of Emergency Physicians has viewed street running videos and calls the practice "a real risk sport."

"With skateboarding, you may break an arm (or) a wrist," says Bishop, an emergency room physician in Bloomington, Ind. "If you're jumping from one building to another … that's really dangerous. I mean, you die if you fall. This is a whole lot different from skiing, skateboarding and mountain biking."

But not everyone cautions against danger. Xin Sarith Wuku, 25, of Westminster in Orange County, Calif., hosts perhaps the most popular YouTube parkour video with more than 18 million views, full of action shots. He also eschews cautionary notes sounded by many practitioners, saying his motto is "train hard and live free."

"When I grew up, I watched video games and comic books and kung fu movies, and no one ever told me that it was impossible," Wuku says. "So I went out and I did it." Wuku dubs himself an "Urban Ninja," has appeared in commercials and performed stunts, and hopes to become the next Jackie Chan.

But others practice it as much for its spiritual side.

"It's about getting back in touch with the idea that humans are supposed to move," says Andy Tran, 21, a student in Hamilton, Ontario, who lives in Washington, D.C. "We lead these sedentary lifestyles where we just sit around all day. It's about honing the body to a point where it's useful to other people."

Share this story:

 Digg del.icio.us Newsvine Reddit FacebookWhat's this?

Enlarge By Essie Snell Urban leap: Ryan Ford, 20, who grew up practicing traditional sports, jumps a gap in downtown Denver.