Lincs Parkour 06 – Present

The following is an article that I have composed detailing how Lincs Parkour began, how it developed, and the intentions and goals of our community. Please enjoy and feel free to suggest any alterations.

History

It was in January 2006, that Dale Annous arrived in Lincoln with two very different intentions. The first was to attend the Lincoln University for the sake of his education. And the second, for the sake of his love for parkour, and his belief that everyone should at least have the opportunity to sample its unique thrills, was to form Lincolns very first Parkour community.

Wasting no time, Dale immediately made his presence on the Lincolnshire parkour scene known through the internet. Using forums such as Worldwide jam and Urban Freeflow, as well as finding videos on you tube and Myspace, Dale slowly began to build a list of potential traceurs to approach.

Firstly he contacted Jake Kelly, a traceur from the Boston area. Unfortunately, with Dale being based in Lincoln, this made regular training sessions a real problem. When Dale got in contact with Ben Christian, a Sleaford based traceur, communication became a lot easier. After the first meeting, Dale and Ben continued the search for other practitioners of parkour, and came across Lincoln and Metheringham based teams, Linx Freeflow and Team Flying Daggers.

After Dale got in contact with both Stuart Palmer of LFF and Jonathon Parker of TFD, it was not long before traceurs from all corners of Lincolnshire came together for their first major jam. It was an immediate success, with a dedicated training atmosphere and a genuinely friendly collection of people, all discovering new techniques and philosophies about the parkour discipline.

Several weeks and an equal amount of astoundingly successful training sessions later, on May 15th, The Lincs Parkour website and forum was released. Immediately after, popularity for the new born group grew rapidly and gained interest from the even further reaches of Lincolnshire including Spalding and Grimsby.
Now that Lincs Parkour had established a firm (but still developing) presence in the parkour scene, awareness of the growing interest in the discipline had grabbed the attention of Parkour organisation “Worldwide Jam”. In October of 2006, Daniel Illabaca, Luke Markey, Brad Wendes, Brad Moss and Chris Harbour all came down to Lincoln for a week in order to hold the cities very first parkour workshop, and train with the new and enthusiastic community.

This workshop gained immediate attention from local newspaper “The Lincolnshire Echo” who printed an article about parkour, and the Local parkour community.
In the following weeks, Lincs Parkour’s forum membership rocketed like never before. So many people, had gained a sudden interest in this exciting and adventurous new sport and were almost begging for a chance to try it out and train with Lincs parkour.

After this, popularity for the community went from strength to strength. Interviews with local TV and radio stations, several articles in local papers and even a short ten minute documentary entitled “Jump Lincoln” all helped to place Lincoln’s parkour community firmly on the map.

The sheer scale of the community became apparent to all at the very first annual trace gathering, when out of 120 traceurs attending the event, Lincoln arrived with the biggest following of all.
Success throughout 2007 was phenomenal for the community, with an astounding three members becoming sponsored athletes for Worldwide jam and Urban Freeflow and several other members performing jobs such as workshops, after school classes and public shows.

Lincs Parkour has recently set up a workshop which is already a resounding success with young people all over Lincolnshire and continues to grow in popularity week after week.

Intentions and information

Lincs Parkour have the exact same intentions now as we did in the beginning, to help promote and teach parkour to absolutely anybody who is interested. We are a team and a community, dedicated to assisting anyone who requires help getting started, or further developing their skills in parkour.

We do not consider ourselves an organisation, we are not work colleagues. We are an incredibly close collection of good friends who are always looking for friendly and enthusiastic new people to join us. We aim to promote a fun and constructive atmosphere at every single jam and event in order to display what an effective and pleasant community we run.

We also aim to promote parkour accurately to the public in order to spread a positive message and help people to gain a more detailed understanding of what exactly we are doing. We take care in how we convey ourselves to the public by maintaining a polite and more importantly, environmentally cautious attitude. Anyone who believes that we seek to vandalise property or simply cause any form of general nuisance, we tend to approach and describe to them our true intentions.

It has always been our intention to spread the word of parkour far and wide, and with our workshops and many close friends such as Worldwide Jam, Trace, and the Sayian clan all striving towards similar goals, the future for Lincs parkour, and parkour in general is looking brighter than ever.