Traceurs are the practitioners of le parkour, which is the practice of overcoming obstacles in the most fluid and efficient way possible.
Traceur is the name given to practitioners of le parkour. The word is of French origin and literally means “tracer”, or one who builds a path to be taken, one who traces a path to be taken. In this context is the central idea of parkour, where the practitioner turns obstacles into challenges to be conquered in the most organic and fluid way possible.
The idealization of the le parkour movement is generally attributed to David Belle and Sébastian Foucan , being defined by Belle as “the art of overcoming obstacles”. For the traceur, urban obstacles are seen as possible means of locomotion in the urban environment, where free and creative movements are employed in the most natural way possible so that the practitioner can move around using the barriers in their displacement.
For traceurs, physical conditioning is extremely important, since the body is their main means of locomotion and is their tool to overcome urban obstacles. The skills of a traceur are limited only by their creativity and physical capacity, so constant training, in addition to being necessary to avoid serious accidents, is essential in the life of a parkour practitioner .
Free running is a mode of parkour in which the beauty of movements matters more than fluidity
Parkour represents a contemporary ideological movement that seeks the culture of a healthy body and mind and the resumption of the urban environment, now taken by automobiles, by the human body, contesting the forms of construction of modern cities, in which streets are made with the purpose of housing only cars, motorcycles and other automobiles, to the detriment of natural human locomotion, of pedestrians.
The traceur is an active member of the community of parkour practitioners, who seek, with their ideology of freedom and harmony with their own bodies and the urban environment, to overcome physical and social barriers, as a group and subculture, contesting and at the same time time, adapting to the difficulties imposed by the modern configuration of urban environments.
