The mental game / threats from two sides

Introduction

Almost all freestyle sports involve an element of high risk and it seems that that is not accidental but the danger is the very thing why people are doing some jumps or challenges. The public is often confronted with these clips and the usual reaction is incomprehension – which you can see in the comment section of viral Parkour videos. People are wondering why would anyone voluntarily risk to lose their health or even life for such an unnecessary thing like a jump. And it's a good question because the usual and probably reasonable motive is to preserve these and so this kind of behavior is seen as something abnormal or dysfunctional.

No need to explain

I would like to explain this a little bit and I hope that those people will see this video (or read this article which is unlikely… But you can send it to your uncle maybe :)

First of all, I don't think that parkour people have to defend themselves for doing these kind of things, if at the same time people are going to the moon and mars or whatever. There seems to be something that makes humans want to push the boundaries more and more. Maybe it's just a problem that humans can imagine more than they can actually do and this might sort of make them feel imprisoned. Well, whatever it is, if you look at humanity as a whole, „pushing boundaries“ doesn't really seem abnormal. It seems rather like the usual mode.

Now, besides that I don´t think Parkour people need to justify their behaviour to the public, the „why“ is still an interesting question, that parkour people should ask themselves every now and then. I´m sure that does no harm.

Noble motives?

When we ask “why”, we get different answers from different people. If you would ask parkour people or the sports people, they would probably give you all kind of noble reasons as to why they are doing very risky things, whereas the public or outsiders would often suspect some not so noble motives, such as fame, attention, likes, admiration by others and such. And it's true that these „lower motvies“ surely are an incentive and it is also true that parkour people doing these kind of risky things do get these rewards to a certain degree. People are respected in the parkour community if they have done „insane“ things.

Yet, you need to consider this: Before you can even do something which gains any attention by anyone, you will have to put in years and years and years of training. It's not that you can just decide, „oh, let's get some likes, lets just jump off that roof.“ So behind these crazy jumps, there's usually always a very passionate individual who has committed years and thousands of hours of training his craft and acquiring a skill before he even reaches a level of skill that could interest others. That is not to say that Parkour people are not doing stupid things for stupid reasons, it´s just to say that at least they havn´t started like that! It was usually not the initiating motivation to learn their sport.

Adrenaline?

If it were just the so-called “thrill”, then you could also do less demanding things, for example simply run blindly across the road, or take your hands off the steering wheel for a moment or something. There would be an infinite number of ways to get an adrenaline shot. But that's just not it. If there's no skill involved, then it's not interesting.

The mental game

To understand the „why“ behind this whole phenomena of doing dangerous things a little bit better we will need to look at the process behind these „crazy jumps“. In parkour we call the scary part of it the mental game. The mental game basically starts at that point where you want to do something but you can't because you're scared. And this is something that happens in parkour from the very beginning. Already in the first session you are probably faced with some kind of fear - but not because you're on a rooftop, but because you're scared to hurt your toe, for example. So it starts on a very tiny, non-dangerous level.

Seeing the jump / the internal simulator

So from the very first training, you have to face fear all the time and you will have to develop a strategy to overcome it. And I can't speak for everyone, but in general, how you overcome this fear is not through crazy willpower or some especially high courage, but rather you need to come to a inner feeling of certainty that you can do it successfully and safely.

You can often hear parkour people standing at a jump and they say that they can feel or „see“ the jump. This feeling or internal seeing is their movement experience and their understanding of movement which is telling them in a very feelable way that they can do it. This seeing a jump is feeling the jump as it should be, even though you have never done this specific jump. So there is some kind of an internal simulation.

And when a Parkour person cannot see and feel the jump, it means that the jump is not covered by the inner simulation, or that the person is not in the right head-space to see it. And so if they can't see it, they have to go about any measures to make them see it or - if it's not possible - to see that they can't do it. Either way, there needs to be the certainty that you can make yourself do it, despite acute danger. Often, the main challenge of a mental battle is to just arrive at that point where you feel or see the jump, and then it´s almost done already.

And so if Parkour people are not seeing the jump right away, they undertake all kinds of steps to get to the point of seeing it: For example, they're looking for jumps that are similar but have less consequence, so they're not at height but at the floor, or they are counting distances, they're comparing it with other jumps they did, or they are doing the jump with a less difficult move etc. And all of this is gathering information to gain insight about the jump, to know what it is about, and then to see, „ah, okay, I can do it.“, or „Oh no, I actually cannot do it“. Usually before doing a potentially dangerous jump the athletes experience a socalled mental battle, which is basically the internal wrestling between their inner assurance and doubts.

The mental game – a rational process

So the mental battle is a wrestling between the inner assurance that you can do something (based on your internal simulator) versus all kind of strong emotions, doubt and fear and voices telling you what could go wrong and what will go wrong and that you will not make it and all of these kind of things. This mental battle is really a very intense thing and it sometimes just feels horrible. You can really hate it.

But it shows that the whole mental process behind these „crazy jumps“ is actually a very rational process because you're trying to overrule emotions with your calculations / with your understanding of movement. The very word rationality means calculating, so the process is in the most literal sense rational.

Funnily, if you think about craziness as a huge gap between your view of the world and how the world actually is - which I think would be a pretty accurate description of craziness, then these „crazy jumps“ require actually the exact opposite of craziness. And so it is. No matter how crazy you are, if you are crazy in Parkour, your career as a sender will be very short.

„Sender mentality“

It's interesting to see that in the past parkour was rather conservative about risk-taking and you were almost judged for being injured or having had a fail or something like that. Nowadays it's almost the opposite: the „sender mentality“ is something cool, something accepted. Recklessness has this cool image. Ever since sending became socially accepted, the incentives to do high-risk jumps are for many blurring the line between „trying to seem reckless“ and actually being reckless. And it seems that some people try so desperately to be on the cool side that they are tempted to go a little bit too far beyond their calculation, commit too early, and then get injured.

Ironically, even if people do that and they fail and they do get injured a lot, they are still seen in the scene as someone having a strong mental game. Wheras in fact it's weak mental game. It's irrationality ruling you. A good mental game is a calculation that is correct, and freedom from injury is the only legitimate proof of this.

If you miss too often, then you're either making jumps that are beyond your skill (your understanding of movement), or you're letting yourself be tempted for other reasons. Or tell me: if you love movement, why would you risk your movement ability for a jump? That doesn't make sense. It may just be that people get too tempted by the status they hope to gain from a jump and then start gambling.

Threats from two sides

So you can see that your mental game is kind of threatened from two sides:

The voices on one side are saying: „No, you can't do it“, even though you could,

The voices on the other side are saying: „Yes, you can do it“, even though you can't.

And both sides are off. Both sides, if they win the mental battle are bad mental game, because on the one side you get tempted to not do something, for irrational reasons. And on the other side you also get tempted, but to do something for irrational reasons.

Of course, the latter is way more dangerous.

If you ask me, everything in parkour needs to be precise like a stick - no overshooting, no undershooting, only then it's accurate. And that also counts for the mental side of Parkour. You can overshoot mentally.

Are the critics right?

The trend towards the so-called “sender mentality” has made sloppy mental game socially acceptable. And that's just stupid. The mental game is one of the coolest aspects of parkour – a fine art! And to discredit it is not only stupid because it's dangerous, but also because it confirms all the stereotypes that the supposedly ignorant public has about parkour. And then suddenly they're right. Embarrasing.

The beauty of the mental game

So you could say the challenge of the mental game is basically that your conception of a jump and the actual real jump are matching. And this precision, this perfect match is really the beauty of the mental game. And the highest degree of testing this precision is in a place where there's no room for error. And it is hard to explain to other people why it is so deeply satisfying. But it is. If that is a justified reason or not, you must decide for yourself.

So that's it. Send responsibly.