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THE elderly man stops in his tracks and stares ahead, slack- jawed. He does not say anything for a good five minutes.
Finally, he ventures in Mandarin: 'Wa, zai pai wu xia pian ah?' (Are they filming a martial arts movie?)
It could have been so, if not for the fact that we are standing in a housing estate in Sengkang, surrounded by gleeful children from the nearby playground.
This, incidentally, is also the playground of 23-year-old Ashton Law, who practises parkour. The physical discipline - which originated in France - requires participants to negotiate obstacles along a path in the most efficient way possible, using skills such as leaping and climbing.
This means that parkour practitioners, called traceurs, end up doing a lot of things that normal people do not do.
Instead of walking up the ramps by holding on to the railings for support in their void decks, traceurs may vault or jump from railing to railing to practise precision landing.
Normal people take the stairs to get from the second floor to the first. Traceurs leap over the parapet and live to tell the tale.
Once, says Mr Law, a policeman who witnessed his second-floor leap threatened to arrest him for attempted suicide.
'If I was attempting suicide, why would I bother to land on my feet?' he asks, rolling his eyes in disbelief.
His training sessions - which are pretty much anywhere with a range of obstacles all over the island - attract the attention of passers-by, some of whom call the police.
'I always tell them that we are just doing our own training. It's better for the young to use their energy here than to pick fights or take drugs.'
Someone, he lets on, even suggested that the traceurs appeal to their MPs to build a 'parkour park'.
'But that defeats the purpose of parkour itself,' he says, since parkour is about adapting to any given environment.
Like any good traceur, Mr Law does not hit the gym or tear up the running track. Instead, he sprints in multi-storey carparks 'for the explosive power', and improvises a bouldering exercise using the concrete edge of flower beds.
The tall, lean man started practising parkour on his own seven years ago after watching a clip about French parkour group Yamakasi on the TV programme Ripley's Believe It Or Not!
By posting video clips of his own moves online, he soon linked up with other traceurs in Singapore.
Today, the parkour community here has about 1,000 members, he says. The traceurs, who are mostly teenage boys, log on to a dedicated forum to give one another tips and arrange jam sessions.
Mr Law runs a parkour performance company that has performed at Zouk and events of companies such as SingTel and StarHub. He feels he has parkour to thank for turning his life around.
'When I was in school, I didn't do too well in my studies. I just did okay in track and field, and my basketball was horrible.
'I thought to myself, why can't I do anything well?'
It was only when he found his groove in parkour that he gained self-esteem.
His company touches the lives of schoolboys like Lee Zheng Hou, 15, whom he employs on a freelance basis. The self-confessed former 'bad boy' says: 'I used to smoke, pick fights and get into trouble. Now I would rather train.'
As Mr Law puts it, parkour is more about self-control and focus than mindless stunts.
Some people who train in a group may feel pressured to execute a move that everyone else is doing even when their bodies are not conditioned for it. A good traceur, he says, should know when not to take the risk.
Then there are other moments when the body is ready, but the fear takes hold. That calls for a different kind of training altogether.
He says with the calm of a Zen master, as Zheng Hou paces the top of a slim parapet: 'Sometimes we have to purposely walk in high places to get used to fear.'
This article was first published in The Straits Times.
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