Advanced Parkour

How long does it take to master a discipline?

Malcolm Gladwell set the number at 10,000 hours (or 10 years). But does it really take that long?

I am 63 class hours into my parkour training at the Brooklyn Zoo NY. In June 2014, I started taking classes there every week. In March 2015, they offered an advanced parkour class, which I am now taking.

Now…though I have just started taking classes at that level, taking an advanced parkour class is an accomplishment. You don’t just walk into a gym and run up its wall and touch the building’s 2o foot high ceiling in 2.80 seconds — the new record I set last night. It takes training, training, and oh, more training.

I’m far above 63 hours for sure, but I don’t have a good gauge for how many hours I’ve really invested. As I have been doing parkour on and off since 2009, I’ve likely logged a few hundred hours parkouring on my own time. Realistically, no more than 1,000 hours, and honestly, that number seems high to me.

“Mastery” is subjective. There’s an amazing documentary called “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” if you want to know what true mastery looks like (hint: a lot like humility). Free runner Pip Andersen broke a Guinness world record recently for the longest sideflip (over 5 meters!?), and he’s been doing parkour/free running for seven years. So maybe Gladwell is generally correct.

But just as “mastery” is subjective, so are “expert” or “advanced” labels. There’s a different label I sometimes borrow, and I’ll tell you when it works. I call myself a New Yorker. Any self-respecting native-born New Yorker would cry “fraud! fraud!” if I said such nonsense in their hearing. But when you find that you’ve been in New York longer than anyone else in the room, you can not only claim that title — often one of the newer blood will call you a “New Yorker.” And you’ll smile to yourself because you know that nine years in New York doesn’t really count, even when it’s a third of your life.

So to parallel that with parkour, you can ask yourself: am I the most experienced traceur (or traceuse) in the room? If so, then congratulations, you are the relative expert. But at my gym, I am rarely, if ever, the most experienced, given that there’s usually an instructor (shout-out to BASILIO!) in the house. So I’m never really the expert in the room — but I will accept (and appreciate) that I fit, quite comfortably, in the advanced parkour class.