You're pretty good at parkour... for a girl.

I'm sitting here eating plantain chips and watching parkour clips on YouTube. All of today's featured videos on the front page of YouTube are parkour videos that have been selected by user SlamCamSpam - a collabo between independent filmmaker Juile Angel and the Parkour Generations school.

Parkour, or FreeRunning, started in the 80s in France but has been inserting itself into the mainstream more and more over the past couple of years. In commercials (Rogers, Coke, Nike, etc.) music videos (David Guetta, Madonna), and so on. But in all its pop-culture iterations thus far, there has been a lack of female presence in parkour media. Which is why I am particularly interested in this short doc by Angel that follows Karen Palmer, a "dedicated female parkour student", who sees the challenge of mastering parkour as being more about the mental than the physical. Easy for her to say; she can leap like a frog! Nevertheless the video is a nice portrait and a welcome change from the typical jump-and-trick montages that litter the internet right now.

Take a look-see at The Outside In: Female Parkour

I think what I find most attractive about parkour is the philosophy behind it. These young people are effectively reclaiming and redefining the urban spaces (I could make a comparison to graffiti culture here) they're jumping in/around/over; navigating thier bodies with such ease and agility as if there are no boundaries to where they can go. The world is their playground.

I'm not sure what the parkour scene is like in Canada. Does anyone know of groups practicing in their area?