Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 20

“YOU REALLY GROW to love George, don’t you?” Chris White said, as we inched along a thin goat track on the cliffs above Sfakiá. Sun glare and sweat were scorching my eyes, but Chris seemed unbothered. “Such warmth and humor. He’s a true Greek hero. Honest but a trickster. Brave, but goofy.”

Awful climbs on crumbling footing, I’d begun to see, put Chris in a meditative mood. Several times along this same cliff face I’d been frozen in place, convinced there was no way forward that wouldn’t end in freefall, while far ahead, I could hear Chris’s voice fading around a bend as he motored along obliviously, chatting about his old job working with the homeless in Miami Beach or his recent fascination with clinical research into root causes of good luck. (Visual receptiveness is key, apparently, along with extensive kinship bonds.)

Personally, I was fixated on how George could handle a trail like this with a girl on his back. George couldn’t have weighed more than 130 pounds, but he’d once saved a friend’s daughter by piggybacking her up these mountains with the Turk and his Gestapo band hard on his heels. George had been standing sentry early one morning when he heard a patter of gunshots. The Turk had tortured a Cretan prisoner into leading them to a guerrilla hideout, but made the mistake of shooting at a villager they spotted on the trail, giving George a chance to sprint back and sound the alarm.

“In a moment all our men were gathered along the height, opening fire on a party of Germans and Italians,” George recalled. One guerrilla hollered to George to alert the nearby village. George arrived to find a friend’s wife fleeing with her two little girls, so George and another man hoisted the girls on their backs and ran for it.

They made the woods just in time. “The Germans, having cut off the upper villages, were streaming south from every direction,” George recalled. George headed toward a hamlet he thought would be safe, but veered away when he heard distant screams and the roar of flames. The Germans had already arrived and were burning villagers to death in their own homes. Slipping and dodging, George snaked his little escape party through the dragnet and reached the remote home of one of his aunts. There, the young girl slid down from George’s back to safety.

Purely on a strength and skill level, I didn’t have to guess what that rescue was like; I could feel it. My boots were struggling for grip along the same cliffs—possibly the same trail—and I was carrying a pack roughly the weight of a small girl. I hadn’t stood guard duty the night before or begun my day with a high-speed mountain traverse to save my friends from German stormtroopers, but already my legs were burning, my balance was shaky, and every step, no matter how slow, seemed too quick to be safe. That was the simple genius of the Chris White immersion method: it got to the bottom of the historical questions—the whos and wheres and whens of the traitor Alexiou, the guerrilla chieftain Bandouvas, the frightened young Katsias girls, the villages of Kali Sikia and Nisi—so we could then zero in on the far trickier mystery:

How? How did they actually pull it off?

David Belle had a clue. David grew up in the outskirts of Paris, in a rough neighborhood that was even rougher for half-Vietnamese kids like him. When he got tired of being roughed up by bullies, David decided to do something about it: he teamed up with a band of other mixed-race kids to create what he called a “training method for warriors.” His inspiration was a mysterious stranger, someone David had heard amazing stories about and, a few times, even seen in the flesh: his father, Raymond.

Raymond Belle was born in Vietnam to a French military doctor and a Vietnamese mother. During the First Indochina War, the Belles had to flee for the border. Somehow, Raymond was separated from the family and ended up, at age seven, as a boy soldier in the French colonial army. Training was savage and effective: “It was ‘Walk or Die,’” David Belle would say. “Survival of the fittest.” In the mayhem of a jungle fight against Viet Minh guerrillas, the boys were told, it would be every man for himself. “He started training like a maniac,” David recalled his father saying. “At night, when other kids were asleep, he would get out of bed to go run in the woods, climb on trees, do jumps, push-ups, balance. He would never stop, repeat his moves twenty, thirty, fifty times.”

It worked; Raymond survived the war, and when the French were chased out of Vietnam, he escaped on a refugee boat and made his way to Lyon. There, his jungle-honed natural-movement skills qualified him to become a member of the sapeurs-pompiers—Paris’s elite paramilitary rescue squad. Fearless and nimble, Raymond became the squad’s go-to man whenever a mission looked impossible. Once, he cat-footed far out on a bridge and managed to pull a suicidal woman to safety. What perplexed David wasn’t his father’s heroics but his mechanics. How on earth do you balance with one arm on a spider-web of steel when a woman is trying to hurl both of you into the river?

“When I was young, I was doing parcours,” Raymond explained.

“What is parcours?” David asked.

“Parcours, it’s like in life, you have obstacles and you train to overcome them. You search for the best technique. You keep the best, you repeat it, and then you get better.”

David had to figure out the rest on his own, because his superstar dad was rarely around. David teamed up with other outcast boys, and together they began re-creating Raymond’s survival challenges in the streets around their homes. They called themselves the Yamakasi—a Lingala word from the French Congo meaning “Strong man, strong spirit”—and their homemade training method for warriors would go on to become the open-air, underground fight club known as Parkour.

Somehow, this back-alley art with no rules, no training manual, and—God forbid!—no competitions traveled from the mean streets of France to a drugstore in Pennsylvania farm country. Like the original Yamakasi, the two guys I met in the parking lot were using their own bodies to discover the most animal-efficient way to fly over, around, and under the hard edges of the city landscape the way monkeys tumble through the trees. “I got into it because I was so fat,” Neal Schaeffer told me outside the Rite Aid. He’d begun partying after high school and by age twenty had bloated up from 175 pounds to 240. One afternoon, he was in the park watching some strangers “Kong-vault” picnic tables—they’d charge a table, plant their hands, and shoot both feet through their arms like gorillas and fly off the other side—and Neal was talked into giving it a try. Neal was shocked to discover that, even out of shape, once he got over his fear he could master skills that at first looked impossible.

Well, maybe not master. “You’re on this endless trajectory where you’re always getting better, but it’s never good enough,” Neal explained. “That’s what’s so exciting. As soon as you land one jump, you can’t wait to try it again. You’re always looking for ways to make it cleaner, stronger, flow into your next move.” Neal became a member of a local Parkour tribe that likes to train after midnight, when the city is all theirs. Whenever a police car prowls by, they drop to the ground and bang out push-ups. “No matter what time it is, no one bothers you when you’re exercising.” Within a year, Neal was so fit and trim he was able to scramble to the roof of a three-story building and hang off the flagpole like Spider-Man. “You’re back,” he told himself.

But if I really wanted to learn, Neal pointed out, I was in the wrong parking lot. I took his advice and found myself a few weeks later struggling to the top of a twenty-foot retaining wall in a London housing project while a woman half my size and twice my strength stretched out a hand to help me over the top. Ordinarily the climb wouldn’t have been that tough, but after two hours of Shirley Darlington’s wild urban obstacle course, my legs and arms were jelly. Every Thursday, Shirley blasts an e-mail to the hundred or so members of her all-female crew, revealing the secret location for that night’s challenge. She keeps the venue a surprise so her crew never knows what to expect, and she keeps guys away because the biggest threat to Parkour—as even the Yamakasi would agree—is testosterone.

“Young guys turn up, and lots of times all they want is the flash and not the fundamentals,” says Dan Edwardes, the master instructor who gave Shirley her start. “They want to backflip off a wall and leap around on rooftops. With a group of lads, you’ll get the show-off, the questioner, the giddy one. But in a women’s group, there’s none of that. It’s very quiet. They get to it.”

Back in 2005, Dan stepped in to solve a problem the Yamakasi weren’t equipped to handle. No one outside the Yamakasi inner circle really knew what Parkour was supposed to be, and the Yamakasi weren’t interested in explaining. David Belle is an artist, not a teacher; he wants to create new moves, not break down old ones. “The only way you could get into it was if you were determined and crazy enough to find some guys practicing and try to keep up,” Dan explains. “There was no teaching, no guidance.” Dan was in the same fix, but he got lucky: he met François “Forrest” Mahop, a Yamakasi acolyte living in the tough London borough of Westminster. Forrest agreed to let Dan shadow him, and at that moment a crime-fighting duo was formed.

“There’s a lot of gun crime in the area, a lot of knife crime,” Forrest would explain. “A lot goes on after dark that most people don’t see.” A Westminster rec director saw Dan and Forrest leaping around the city one day and realized they were doing exactly what kids are always told not to. In his mind, wheels started whirring. The more they tried to keep youngsters off the streets at night, the more they rebelled. Since they were going to run wild anyway, why not run wild under adult supervision? He asked if Forrest and Dan would teach a few sample classes on Friday nights, just to see whether it could keep some bodies off the streets.

“As a government body, that was visionary,” Dan marveled. “In France, Parkour was vilified.”

But when the rest of the Westminster City Council found out, they were appalled. “They thought we were going to train kids to escape the police,” Forrest would recall. Most UK schools believed Parkour was so dangerous and rebellious, they wouldn’t even allow it on the playgrounds. In the United States, a university graduate student made headlines when campus police tasered and handcuffed him after mistaking his Parkour training for a drug episode. (On a personal note, I was disinvited from a speaking event at a public library when I mentioned I’d be talking about Parkour.) Anything that wild and daring has to be a magnet for juvenile delinquents—and it was. More than a hundred kids turned up for the debut session, and it was bedlam.

Then Forrest and Dan got to work. They began hammering home the Parkour ethic—“Respect your environment. Respect other people”—and taking the young thugs out in the streets to train. “They reappropriate their city space,” Dan says. “They’re less likely to vandalize or litter or cause trouble if they have ownership of it.” Soon, something changed.

“We saw young people that a couple of weeks ago were swearing at them in the classroom, now they’re nodding and saying, ‘Yes, Dan. Yes, Forrest,’” says Cory Wharton-Malcolm, the Westminster sports development officer. “To be able to watch that change over a period of weeks is amazing.” The police were even more dumbfounded. “Metropolitan Police came back and said crime among that age group had dropped 69 percent, which was a mind-blowing stat,” Dan says. Sixty-nine percent! “That was a huge validation that this actually works.”

Dan felt a change coming over himself as well. “Until then, I was about improving myself. Now I thought, Right. Let’s see how many people we can reach and how far we can take it.”

Dan’s next frontier arrived in the form of a single mom playing wingman for her nervous cousin. Shirley Darlington was sixteen when she dropped out of high school to help support her family after her father died, and nineteen when she had a baby of her own. Shirley knew she’d boxed herself into a bleak future, so she began scrambling for a way out. She sold sneakers by day while getting her high school degree at night, then began university studies while creating a job for herself with the health council as a mentor for other teen moms. “I had to grow up fast,” she explains. “I was working full-time and caring for an infant. I didn’t have time to play.” She had two other reasons for begging off when her cousin was too shy to go to Parkour alone: “Never heard of it” and “God, I haven’t exercised since PE class in school five years ago.”

Shirley eventually caved—and regretted it. She and her cousin arrived for the Westminster class and found themselves alone in a sea of lads pulling themselves over brick walls twice as high as their heads. But the heckling and the babying they expected never came. When Shirley and her cousin struggled with a drill, two of the lads who’d already finished silently circled back and completed it by their side. “There’s no written code for Parkour, but pretty much everywhere you find the same principles,” Dan says. “At some point, even the strongest person freezes on a jump. It teaches you humility and reminds you where you came from.” That’s why no one ever finishes a challenge alone. “Even from the beginning, with the Yamakasi,” Dan points out, “Parkour was always about community.”

Dan began having his own visionary breakthrough. Night after night, he watched Shirley show up for class even though she was weak and clumsy and usually exhausted from work and class and pre-dawn baby feedings. For two years, Shirley struggled to do her first pull-up. “She used to just hang from the bar,” Dan says. “She’d pull and pull and she wouldn’t move one centimeter.” But she continued showing up and grabbing for the bar until a year later, Shirley nailed her first “muscle-up”—a challenging and essential Parkour maneuver in which you continue the pull-up until you’re waist high on the bar and can vault yourself on top. By her fifth year, Shirley was not only outperforming the men, like a modern-day Atalanta—she’d become the one circling back to help struggling lads. The real obstacle wasn’t strength, she discovered; it was trust. “I never knew what my body could do, so it took a long time to build the confidence to throw my full weight into a movement,” Shirley says. “Once I did, it changed everything.”

It’s great we’re winning over young guys and thinning out the predators, Dan thought as he watched Shirley’s transformation. But what if we also empowered everyone else? In 2005, only five women in the world practiced Parkour, which Dan found insane. “The time has come for all of us, men and women alike, to adapt to the world we now live in,” Dan believes. By the year 2050, after all, six of every seven people on the planet will live in a city. “We have to shape our training to fit our lifestyle,” Dan says. “We’re no longer surrounded by trees, so we have to learn to climb walls.”

Dan began playing with an idea: What if women discovered they could be just as strong in the city as they were in the wild? What if they knew they could climb, run, jump, and adapt as powerfully as any man? Dan couldn’t really make the case himself, being a man. But he knew someone who could.

On the Thursday morning I arrived in London, my phone pinged with a message from Shirley:

Kilburn tube station, 7 pm.

I got there ten minutes early, but about twenty women were already warming up, including the British movie actress Christina Chong and her sister Lizzi, a professional dancer. We set off at a jog, arriving about a half-mile later at a cement courtyard in the middle of a high-rise housing project. Shirley had us line up at the top of a long, zigzagging access ramp and drop to all fours. We monkey-walked on hands and feet about forty yards to the bottom, then bunny-hopped up the stairs and did it again backwards; then crab style; then squat-hopping, each time with a new twist and a push-up between circuits.

By the thirteenth loop, my hands were cement-scuffed and my head was spinning from being at knee height for so long, but the parade of hopping, bear-crawling, push-upping women showed no sign of slowing. I looked around for Shirley, but she’d disappeared into our midst. “The best Parkour coaches are invisible,” Dan told me. “They get you started, then get out of the way.” I spotted her again when three men took a seat on the wall and began sharing a smoke and loud comments on the women’s bodies. Shirley quietly peeled off from the circuit and trotted over to a swingset. She leaped for the crossbar, and in a blur somehow ended up squatting on top. It’s become her signature move, and it’s a showstopper.

Not long ago, she’d teamed up with Felicity “Fizz” Hood and Anne-Therese “Annty” Marais for an extraordinary YouTube clip called “Movement of 3.” In little more than two minutes, the three cat-leap up and over a seven-foot wall, land precision jumps on two-inch guardrails, execute a hand-to-hand traverse along a rooftop railing, and then Annty and Fizz catapult themselves through a swingset while the single mom who couldn’t do a pull-up when she began Parkour squats on the bar above their heads, perfectly balanced while blowing soap bubbles.

This time, Shirley lowers herself from the bar with such slow grace and power that the three mopes on the wall shove their cigarettes in their mouths so their hands are free to applaud.

Moving on! Shirley’s tribe is heading out, so I have to sling my bag on my back in a hurry and sprint to catch up. For the next two hours, North West London is our playground. Shirley leads us to metal benches, where we practice diving into shoulder rolls and popping back up on a dead run. She finds a beaut of a wall where we work on running arm jumps: running straight up the bricks, basically, and grabbing for the top of the wall, and hoisting ourselves up when momentum dies and gravity takes over. Well after dark, we’re all clinging to a railing as we traverse a cement wall in a hanging squat. My feet are slipping and I’m in danger of dropping off when Lizzi Chong tucks in beside me. “Get your knees higher,” she says. “You’re relying on your arms, but this is about legs.”

Step by step, we work our way to the end, then drop to all fours and bear-crawl on hands and feet back to the beginning; press out our fortieth or so push-up of the night; and get ready for another loop. I try to thank Lizzi for the help, but she waves me off. “I needed a hand to hold when I started because I thought it was too dangerous,” she said. “If I break an ankle, that’s my career.” But after her first class, she was hooked. “I could see the dance in it. The flow, the rhythms, the strength and danger. You’re always on the edge of fear, because your body senses it can do more than your mind will let it.”

By the time Shirley cuts us loose for the night, I never want to do Parkour again and can’t wait to come back. I didn’t just run and climb all over North West London; I still had its cement grit deep under my fingernails. This must be what George Psychoundakis meant when he said a true Cretan citizen is a dromeus, a runner, I thought. Someone who can handle any obstacle and circle his hometown like a guardian spirit.