“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.