By Michelle Theall
My ankle pops. I go down. I hold it for a while. Then I get back up and vault over a 4-foot wall. My left glute cramps somewhere way down deep beneath layers of muscle and fat. I favor my right leg to compensate. I am 42 years old, and I am taking parkour classes. Parkour is a combo of gymnastics, climbing, and free running that uses the world and its obstacles for a playground. If you’ve watched the opening chase sequence in Casino Royale, you saw parkour at its finest. But you’ve also seen it if you’ve watched any children during recess who were under the age of 10.
Monkeying around on all fours (quad-ped movement), I understand just how much of my brain I’ve let atrophy since childhood. No wonder I can’t do a crab walk or a cartwheel. I haven’t tried to do one since I was five. It’s the same way with everyone else in our class, too. Women from their early twenties to mid-forties all comparing sore spots and bruises, like we’ve just discovered a secret Fight Club, and we’re proud of it. Yet everything we’ve done so far we achieved in elementary school. We just forgot about it.
When I come home from a class, I teach my three-year-old the latest moves, contortionist stunts called the cat balance, duck walk, and monkey vault. He doesn’t wait and analyze like I do, doesn’t think about whether his right foot or left hand should be in front first. And, even more notable, he doesn’t look to see if there’s a soft mat or a hard floor beneath him. He watches me and leaps right into it. And his movements seem natural, unlike mine, which are awkward and stiff.
From day one, kids know no fear. Their curiosity overrules everything else: light sockets, traffic, stairs, heights, storms, deep water, and animals five times their size. Why? They don’t know pain well yet. But pretty much the second we arrive on the planet, we start racking up owies. We learn the word no-no before rainbow or magic. Knowing consequences and boundaries is important—but also stifling. Fear keeps adults alive but also keeps them from living full lives. Because of fear, we don’t tell people we love them or try for a job promotion or ask someone if something is wrong. We avoid discomfort and delays in favor of the easy and familiar. We worry about money instead of enjoying a few of the indulgences it might afford us.
I’ve come to believe in two statements that remain simultaneously true: Life is precious and fragile and it takes a lot of effort and bad luck to lose one’s life. If I count up my own near misses, I’ve been assaulted in a train station in Turin, Italy; carjacked at gunpoint in Albuquerque, New Mexico; knocked to my knees by lightning on Colorado’s 14,000-foot Torreys Peak; trampled unconscious by my own quarter horse; and run off the trail by a grizzly. I’ve seen mountain lions, polar bears, snakes, cheetahs, and even a poisonous frog. I’ve been to at least one place where if you drank the water it likely would have killed you. But if I really stop to think about it, the most scarring events in my life happened in my own tiny neighborhood more than 30 years ago.
So, parkour is just one of the fearless new things I’ll be trying in 2009. I’m directing our staff in a redesign of Women’s Adventure (the results of which you’ll see in our next issue). I’ve started a low cholesterol diet (which for a girl raised on steak is more adventurous than one might think). Though I’m scared of bikes (go figure), I’ll be testing electric hybrids for our May/June issue (because if you’re afraid to go cycling, why not add a motor to it?). Finally—and I say this every year, but this time I mean it—I want to grab the end of my board on a jump in a terrain park, a solid, speed-carrying leap with a few seconds between me and the snow. I want big air. Scream-like-a-little-girl air. Because what we find when we stretch our limits, beyond a few bumps and bruises, is the unadulterated joy of our youth and the recurring belief that anything might be possible. After all, we still have our whole lives ahead of us.
