Parkour was created in the Paris suburbs 15 years ago and has only become popular in the UK within the last couple of years. There are now around 20 traceurs (free runners) practising Parkour in the Cambridge area alone and thousands worldwide.

Free running is currently enjoying a huge surge of popularity and artist Beverley Carpenter decided to capture the skill and excitement of this extreme sport by taking photos and shooting video that is now part of an exhibition at Cambourne Business Park. They will also be making a movie during the summer to be shown at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse,

Sam went down to the Lion Yard in Cambridge to meet the artist and free runners themselves:

"I went and interviewed four of Cambridge's traceurs to see what they were getting up to. I definitey knew this was going to be a different kind of interview. I met them and walked around Cambridge and watched them jump, run and flip. Parkour is truly amazing and I was inspired by the four traceurs I met - Owen Covill, Michael Swarbrick, Jin Donovon and Liv Rowlands, all aged 17. This was how the interview went...

How did you get involved with free running?
Jin: "The programme 'Jump London' on Channel 4, first time I saw that, that really inspired me to find out more about it. I have been doing things like break dancing for a while, but that was the kind of thing that I really wanted to get into, went on the websites to find out more."

Liv: "I found out through Jin and came out and tried it."

Owen: "I saw 'Jump London' as well, so I started training by myself for a couple of weeks thinking that no one else was doing it and I thought I was going to be the first person to do it, and then I found a different group of people doing it as well."

Michael: "I followed this lot into it. I have only been doing it a couple of months."

Have you met with the people from Jump London?
Jin: "We met Seb Foucan, in an indoors event hosted by 'Free Through' and basically he came along and talked about the philosophy and helped out people with training."

Are you wanting to do free running as a profession or is it something you just enjoy?
Owen: "Parkour is about self improvement, you apply Parkour to your life as well as like the movements; there is a whole philosophy behind it. You strive for perfection and it's like breaking through the barriers in front of you. When you wake up every morning people just walk through the city and they don’t think at all about the landscape around them and they just get channelled through by the roads around them and paths and we try to break the restrictions that are around us. We take up new challenges and find new routes and explore different ideas. And try to keep your mind open. Parkour helps you do this."

Explain some of the things that you do.
Owen: "Parkour for me is not about individual moves that you perform, it’s all about linking these movements together. For me I think that Parkour should be about a run from A to B. Instead of interlinking moves together it should just be one move. You shouldn’t be able to see a difference, you should see the rhythm and the speed and the elegance in the moves."

Jin: "Parkour is manly about fluidity and all your moves just connecting and being as smooth as possible."

Liv: "I can’t do back flips, but I'm just working on the basic movements at the moment and then connecting them together. I’ve improved a lot over the last few months and that’s my long term target really just to improve."

Michael: "I only started a few months ago, so I’m just trying to catch up really."

Do you do Yoga to help you?
Owen: "Parkour is like a meditation, preparing yourself for a move, you have to engage your mind to everything you're doing, it’s just you and that obstacle and you have to beat it. And everything around you is gone. It is like a meditation."

You must get an adrenalin-rush out of it?
Jin: "You’re mainly just driving on adrenalin all the time, before you do a move you have to have adrenalin. You feel a high at the end of the day as you have done so much exercise."

You must get some injuries?
Owen: "You can’t stop injuries from happening, but you must take at least two days off in-between free running and I stretch everyday."

How long have you been doing it for?
Jin: "10 months – it's constant training. We meet up at least every weekend and sometimes during the weekdays."

Are traceurs mostly teenagers or is there a wide variety?
Owen: "We meet a lot of people in London up to the age of 35. Every month we meet another 20 people when we go to London. This weekend we are going to London to take a trip for four days just to do Parkour."

Are you all in education?
Michael: "Yes, we are all in college."

Do you want to progress this in the future?
Owen: "There is always going to be room for Parkour whether our lives are busy or not, I can’t see myself in the future giving it up, it’s a constant improvement. It’s never stopping."

It was a really interesting interview and I was exhausted just watching them do their free running. This is definitely a new art, and I can see it developing even more...

Find out more about the free running exhibition at Cambourne:
www.freewebs.com/cambourneartist/freerunexhibition.htm

Urban Freeflow: www.urbanfreeflow.com

UK Parkour Association: www.parkour.org.uk