Listen carefully - a whisper crosses overhead.

Look quickly - a half-man, half-shadow slingshots past.

Over here, against the steel and concrete and glass palette of the downtown cityscape, a young man follows a map only he can see, propelling his body on a quicksilver commute that becomes the most important thing in his world for a handful of seconds.

Over there, arching over blue sky and between two spines of sandstone in a summer-hot canyon, a young woman tries to solve a problem that didn't exist in nature before she helped create it.

And in between here and there, in Colorado and the U.S. and on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean, the common thread, the universal language being eloquently spoken by not a lot of people - yet - is parkour.

Part discipline, part sport, part art form, part calling, parkour is "literally getting from where you currently are to where you need to be in the most efficient way possible," says Ryan Ford.

Clean-cut, baby-faced, chiseled and thoughtful, Ford is a 19-year-old University of Colorado student who has been a traceur (practitioner) for three years and speaks about parkour with the quiet fervor of someone who is used to being misunderstood but remains unruffled because he has seen the light and knows that's not his problem.

He knows what parkour is, that it's moving through your environment - running, leaping, climbing, crawling, vaulting, landing, launching - to make progress through whatever happens to be in your path. He knows that if you think of where you are as an obstacle course - indeed, parkour is a manufactured French word, stepchild to parcours, which means "route" - and your goal is, through improvisation, agility and discipline to successfully negotiate that course, then you have a good grasp of what parkour is.

He knows that even if it is often equated with man-made, urban realms - with railings and precise, 90-degree-angle buildings and geometric obstacles - "parkour is really about any environment. You can do it anywhere, anytime."

He knows that "where a normal person sees a wall, a traceur sees an obstacle to overcome, we see" - his eyes take on an almost mystic cast - "an opportunity." But what he really knows about parkour is that "it changes the way you see everything."

Including your future.

The birth of a traceur

Ford grew up ridiculously athletic in all the traditional sports - soccer, baseball, tennis, track and football. He was on the varsity at Golden High School in the latter two sports until "I got burnt out."

Toward the end of his junior year, as he felt himself careening away from football, he decided he wanted to learn how to do a wall flip. You know, run up to a wall, plant a foot and somersault backward. He discovered parkour online, where outlets such as YouTube were offering visual paeans to "some pretty crazy stunts."

But it wasn't the pyrotechnics that interested Ford as much as the pure techniques. The discipline of it, the mental aspects, the purity, the controlled physicality - they all spoke to him.

So did the philosophy of the Frenchman credited with founding parkour in the early 1990s - David Belle, the son of an acrobat and fireman, who grew up wanting to be Spider-Man.

Belle became a devotee of a pioneer in sports and physical education theory named Georges Hébert, who thought indoor gyms were far inferior to the outdoor, more natural, rural activities of African people. Hébert's concepts became part of the training procedure of French firemen and led to the creation of a "parkours," an obstacle course. Belle - and others - expanded on the parkours, grafting it to an urban schematic where walls, alleys between rooftops, gratings, railings, steps, sculptures and ledges became opportunities rife with challenge. As Belle recently told the New Yorker, parkour became a "method for learning how to move in the world. For finding the liberty men used to have."

At first, Ryan Ford's parents didn't share their son's ardor. At first, they were dismayed, convinced "it was stupid risk-taking - just jumping off buildings for no reason." But Ryan persisted, brought them around to the philosophy. As for injuries, well, what about the stress fracture in his heel, the hyperextended elbow, all those ankle sprains he had incurred in those "normal sports"?

Yes, there was risk involved in parkour. Yes, eventually Ryan would wind up with a separated shoulder when his foot caught a rail in a downtown Denver park and he went tumbling into some unforgiving concrete. But there's risk in everything, unless you want to live your life in a cocoon, right? Don't they say opportunity knocks? Maybe sometimes it knocks a little harder than others. Besides, Ryan was going about parkour slowly - practicing "gradualism." Learning that parkour wasn't about bravado, learning that "it's not about the moves, it's about the movement." Learning that the "mental side is huge. You have to overcome your fear. Be creative. Solve problems."

Eventually, he would also learn about "free running" - an outgrowth of parkour where acrobatics and flair are married to the Point-A-to-Point-B discipline. But before that, he would first revel in the portability of parkour, learning how "it's amazing the stuff you can do on a little park bench or railing."

You want more amazing? Parkour made him start eating healthier, made him want to be fitter, a better traceur. Then it took hold in other ways.

He began an independent study project at CU with a biomechanics professor to examine safe landing techniques for traceurs. He began teaching training classes at local gyms. He decided that his career would be operating his own gym, incorporating all the different activities - martial arts, gymnastics, cardiovascular - you need to excel at parkour into programs to make people healthier.

To maybe bring them to that moment when you're standing in front of, say, a wall and "it's a little scary. Your heart is pounding, adrenaline is rushing." To get them to the instant when "nothing is going through your mind but total focus on the object at hand. It's like a whole little world - nothing exists for that split second except you and that object."

And this, too: to help them discover all those glorious opportunities in an obstacle course most of us can't see.

Cats, kongs and flying

Silently, stealthily, Matt Marshall has just executed one sweet cat leap. Although it's one of the basic moves of parkour, there's nothing ordinary about Marshall's grace and strength. It's easy to believe the Metropolitan State College of Denver student was once a competitive gymnast before he found parkour. In the three years since, Marshall has acquired a lithe power, perhaps the same form and line Hunter Neibelum may one day mirror.

Neibelum is 15 - eight years younger than Marshall - and from under a thick bird's nest of dark curls, he is quietly studying the older guy. He's been interested in parkour for a year and is not hesitant about telling you why.

"My mom always said I've been bouncing off walls my whole life," he says. "Guess I've been doing all these things, and now there's a name for it. I really love having all this freedom of movement."

But that's not all he experiences in the moment.

"I feel like I'm flying," he says, following Marshall onto what local traceurs call "Cat Fountain" in Skyline Park, trying his hand at cat leaps, kong vaults, precision jumps, even the stray tic-tac, movements that Marshall calls "some of the fundamentals."

After 10 or 15 minutes of fundamentals, Neibelum feels the need for more freedom. "Watch this," he says.

"I eagerly await this thing I hear of," says Marshall skeptically. Neibelum nails a 360-degree flip - more free-running than parkour, but still impressive. As he does, Nick Brown, 13, shows up. He is wearing a faded T-shirt that reads, "I am a Beef Roast."

"It means what it means, man," he sighs at a hopelessly uncool middle-age man. He'd rather talk about the golfball-size lump on his clavicle, a souvenir of the break that occurred because "I got careless and got messed up on a roll." Then again, Brown's only been at parkour for two months.

Soon, the trio is on the move - Marshall with feline rhythms, the younger boys considerably less refined although relentlessly kinetic. They reach a 4-foot concrete ledge. Marshall executes a speed vault, pushing himself up and over with one hand and landing with a quick flourish on the sidewalk.

"Pretty intense," Brown says.

"Do it while you can, young man!" shouts an overweight senior citizen who is passing by.

Marshall nods, turns away and says, "We get that a lot."

He turns back to Neibelum, who is about to try his hand at a speed vault. "Remember, dude, the wider the angle, the harder it is."

Today's jam - a parkour gathering - proceeds across Skyline Park to the 16th Street Mall, flower-planter boxes, park benches and trash cans becoming catalysts for leaps and vaults. Then Marshall spots one of those cow sculptures that dot the mall.

"You think they're gonna put a cow thing there and I'm not going to do something?" he asks. The words are barely out of his mouth before he takes a quick running start, leaps over a ledge and up onto - and then over - the cow, landing like a cloud, surprising the man who is pushing a stroller nearby.

"Maybe I'll call that a bovine vault," he says.

He scans the park for other possibilities, assessing a nearby information booth.

"This is where you have to really check out your surfaces," he says. "Look at that metal plate - it's probably not held by more than a screw; it'd come right off if you grabbed it." Then, running his hand over the smooth surface of an information booth, he shakes his head and says dismissively, "It's like frickin' Teflon."

Moving down the mall, Marshall stops. He sees something. His face becomes a mask of concentration - a three-dimensional equation is being posed, analyzed and solved. Then he's off.

A raised concrete planter with a tree is blithely surmounted with a kong vault - hands planted atop the planter, feet threaded between his hands, apelike. No sooner has he finished then he's looking somewhere else, oblivious to the line of raised eyebrows, people who clearly don't hear opportunity knocking.

Nearby, Neibelum is eyeing the mall for his own opportunities. "Every block is a block of sweet goodness," he says.

"Dude, are you on drugs or something?" Brown asks.

As Neibelum and Brown gambol down the street ahead of him, radiating waves of energy, Marshall says, "The thing about parkour is it kinda caters to those of us with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). It's about touch and go. It's kinda random." He pauses. "In some ways, it's like martial arts without the violence." Near the steps of the Denver Pavilions shopping center, Brown throws himself into a maneuver.

"That kong felt pretty good," he says proudly.

Better than it feels to be given the bum's rush by three separate security guards at the main branch of the Denver Public Library and the Denver Art Museum. Not that anybody takes it personally. In fact, Marshall is able to predict ahead of time when they will be asked to leave. Sometimes, it's even like guards become part of a traceur's opportunities.

Nostalgia coloring his voice, Marshall speaks fondly of one 17th Street plaza that is being torn down. "It was the ultimate challenge to see how fast you could do stuff before they came to throw you out," he says. Then, with admiration, "Those guys were really on top of their game."

"Dude. Are you on drugs or something?" Brown asks.

Ignoring Brown ("Hard to believe, but he isn't the most annoying guy in the group anymore"), Marshall eyes the landscape for possibilities, for the chance to perhaps create something new.

"I invented a new move a few weeks ago," he says. "I haven't named it or perfected it yet, but" - big smile - "it is pretty freaky."

Between sky and abyss

There is the distinct possibility that Ryan Ford could do some serious damage to one or more of his body parts if he isn't careful. At the moment, he is balancing on a large rock high up in Boulder Canyon. Behind him, the view is pure panorama - a carpet of trees and tall grasses billowing down to the city far below. But Ford is unaware of what's behind him. He's all about the present.

"You really have to focus," he says. "You can sprain an ankle up here really easily."

Being up here, in the foothills - away from the predictable urban geometry - has a particular appeal to Ford.

"In the natural environment, everything is asymmetrical. You never find the same rock, the same footing," he says. "It's pretty cool - all different surfaces and angles, and you just have to adapt."

That's just what 12-year-old Austin Waisanen is trying to do. Waisanen, of Boulder, is staring across a 4-foot-wide chasm, thinking about a cat leap.

"Can you do it?" Ford asks.

"Mmm, maybe," Waisanen replies.

"There are no maybes in parkour," Ford insists.

Waisanen cat leaps successfully. It's time for Carolynn Grigsby. The 15-year-old high school student arrived at parkour's doorstep when she discovered how "it helps build body awareness." She also plays soccer, runs cross country, dives, mountain bikes and telemark skis. Right now, it seems as if she'd rather be doing any of those things.

"Kind of sketchy," she murmurs, looking across at the wall of abrupt rock. More time elapses. Her sense of mortality refuses to relinquish its hold. She is becoming annoyed with herself, her monologue peppered with, "Yikes . . . oh, my gosh . . . this is pathetic."

Ford understands. He has stood where Grigsby stands. "Fear," he says, "is an enemy, but it also helps keep you grounded. If that little voice is telling you, 'Don't do it,' don't do it."

Grigsby's little voice apparently has other things to say. Eventually, she makes her (cat) leap of faith, hitting the opposite rock wall with an emphatic but harmless "Ooph!" But there's no time for any relief - she has to clamber to keep up with Ford, Waisanen and, most of all, a 16-year-old cocktail of sinew, legs and testosterone named Sat Santokh Khalsa.

The American-born son of American-born parents who converted to Sikhism, Santokh Khalsa wears a turban but no shirt as he nimbly arcs his frame across wide patches of air. His landings are like feathers.

"Sat is kind of the master of precision jumps," says Ford respectfully but matter-of-factly, watching as Santokh Khalsa inspects the latest incarnation of asymmetrical topography, a 9-foot-wide chasm.

Santokh Khalsa's braces glimmer in the sun as he grimaces. Deep in thought. Computing. Aware that pretty much all that separates him from a 10-foot plummet is an 8-inch landing strip.

"That'd suck if I missed that and went over," he says. His tone is stone-cold analytical. Not the slightest trace of maybe anywhere in his bearing.

Then he's airborne. For a heartbeat, he seems to hang in the air, a silhouette frozen between blue sky and a shadowed abyss. Then - more feathers.

"Whoa," Waisanen says.

"Very cool," Grigsby says.

Ford nods slightly. Filing away what he's just seen. You can tell he's just learned something. About the terrain. About Sat.

This canyon jam folds into the waning afternoon. Crevices, horns, crags, gaps appear. Opportunities to be seized. Or considered. Lurking alongside them are fears that will be obeyed or overcome, depending on what arises.

And what arises will always be different, mutating into something else. Because, whether you're up in nature or down in the city, the landscape is always strewn with new paths to be walked by traceurs choreographing a ballet of whispers and shadows. A ballet that is less about the moves than the movement.

• WHAT IS PARKOUR? "Parkour is the art of moving through your environment using only your body and the surroundings to propel yourself. It can include running, jumping, climbing, even crawling, if that is the most suitable movement for the situation. Parkour could be grasped by imagining a race through an obstacle course, the goal is to overcome obstacles quickly and efficiently, without using extraneous movement."

• WHAT ISN'T PARKOUR? "Parkour is not acrobatics, tricking, stunts, recklessness or jumping off high objects for no reason. It is not any movement or activity that doesn't fit in the description 'What Parkour Is.' "Source: Americanparkour.Com

See it for yourself

A parkour jam that is expected to attract some of the nation's leading 'traceurs' - including Mark Toorock - is scheduled at various sites in the metro area Aug. 10 to 13.

• Times and locations are being finalized

• For more information, call 720-841-2303 or go to ColoradoParkour.com

• For additional information on parkour, go to AmericanParkour.com

meadowj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2606

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