Mr. Parkour and
I paid a visit last night to Gleason’s Gym, a sprawling gymnastics center
artfully hidden in a suburban industrial park just south of the city. This was
not my idea, but I tagged along with my housemate/former child out of curiosity
and a faint notion that I should be supporting his newly won interest in
fitness. You’d understand if you saw him swinging on the clothesline pole –
these days he’s inhabiting a body that seems to be electrically charged. He’s
just got to have a place to expend all this energy.

And it’s hard to
imagine a better place for him than Gleason’s. At our local gym, we have plenty
of cardio and resistance machinery to work various muscle groups, but this
place is more like a giant parkour playground, with climbing ropes,
trampolines, springboards, and all manner of large padded obstacles to test the
aspiring free-runner.

MP pointed out
his parkour guru standing at the end of a long runway where two young men were
joyfully launching themselves into back flips and landing in a pit filled with
foam cubes. One of MP’s lifelong dreams, he has confided to me, is to complete
a back flip on solid ground. For someone who does not aspire to much, this is a
serious endeavor.

But first
there’s this climbing rope dangling from the ceiling in a way that’s not what I
would call inviting, exactly. It’s
more like that kid in seventh grade – the one your mom never liked much – who
enjoyed jumping off the roof of his garage and loved to cajole you into joining him. Before I could really ponder the challenge
(and briefly relive some of the horrors of junior high gym class), MP was
happily ascending, hand-over-hand. No big deal.

I’m not nearly
as competitive as I once was, but there’s something about seeing your own
progeny – someone who not that long
ago held your hand when climbing the back steps – do something you can’t
imagine doing yourself that makes it imperative that you go ahead and do it. So,
I grabbed the rope and started up – hand over hand, no wrapping my legs around
it for extra oomph. Three or four feet later, I descended, doing my best to
appear nonchalant. Just a little warm-up.

MP was charitable,
of course, offering some tips and encouragement (interesting how the father-son
dynamic can shift) before escorting me over to the trampolines. I quickly
noticed that these did not feature a large bouncing surface; the well-worn “X”
upon which I focused my attention was centered on a mesh
fabric that measured perhaps 4 by 8 feet. So, while MP was soaring skyward, I bobbed up and down in a more
exploratory manner, carefully eyeing the “X” and noting the nearby sign that
cautioned bouncers about flying over the safety net.

It’s possible
that at some point in my distant past I frolicked on one of these, but I found it
hard at that moment to imagine the allure. There was a certain exhilaration when airborne, a kind of weightlessness.
What made it tough to enjoy, though, was the knowledge that I was just as
likely to hit my “X” the next time down as to veer wildly off course and find
myself bouncing on a less merciful surface somewhere below.

“It’s really a
type of meditation,” MP assured me, as I searched in vain for some equilibrium.
In fitness circles they’d call my futile bouncing an exercise in proprioception
- perfecting a sense of balance and knowing where your body is in space. It
seemed to me more like an exercise in fear management.

Years ago, when
MP was a toddler, I read an article about a parent who spent the day mimicking
the movements of her 2-year-old. She came away from the experience amazed at
the exertion it required. I was reminded of that as MP led me from one station to
another around the gym: swinging on the high bar, leaping from balance beam to
balance beam, vaulting over and through various padded obstacles. He
demonstrating the proper technique, me attempting to avoid injury.

At one point, he
exploded off the mat to the top of a padded three-step stair. I crouched and jumped to the second step with little difficulty. Feeling my oats, I announced I
would go for the top. Unfortunately, the stairs were not anchored to anything,
so when I landed just short of the top step, the whole thing tilted over and I
fell backward and conked my noggin on the (thankfully) padded floor. Note to
self: Do not try this at home.

Eventually, we
made our way into an adjacent room, where MP located a couple of mats upon
which he would attempt his back flips. I offered to spot him, and he showed me
how to position my arms at his back and knees. Then, he crouched low, swung his
arms, and sprung up and back, landing on his feet – though not completely
upright. The next one was better, as was the next and the next. Each attempt
seemed to generate more energy than the last: crouch, swing, spring, flip,
land, smile.

The flips were
not perfect, but his smiles were. And, as we meandered back through the main
room, I tried unsuccessfully to recall a workout that gave me that much joy. Of
course, I’m not 19; there’s probably some major endorphin disparity at work
here. Or maybe it’s more about taking risks, trying something new.

So, when I spied
that climbing rope on our way to the door, I jumped up, grabbed hold and
started pulling myself upward with a real sense of purpose. I made it about
two-thirds of the way to the top (full disclosure: I was using my legs, too)
before I ran out of gas and inched my way back down to terra firma.

Mission
accomplished? Sort of — except my hands still hurt.