90/10 Failure/Success

As a parkour athlete, I spend about 90% of the time failing.

You read that correctly: I spend about 90% of the time - FAILING - at my sport.

This is something I never really considered until I heard Darryl explain it during a first-of-it’s-kind Parkour Integrated Training workshop at Deuce Gym in Venice Beach, CA - home to some of the most incredible human beings on the planet (we’ll get into that a bit later). During one part of the workshop, Darryl was explaining to this group of diversely skilled individuals that in parkour, it’s necessary to fail; as it’s where we gain the most information about what we need to do to not fail. However, failing NINETY PERCENT of the time sounds absolutely absurd. What kind of athlete would allow themselves to perform at such a seemingly incompetent level? Isn’t the goal of professional athleticism to train yourself to succeed at the highest of levels - and often?

The thing is, the more advanced of an athlete you become in parkour, the more challenges begin to creep toward near impossible degrees of difficulty. 

To say that pursuing superhuman levels of performance doesn’t come easy would be an understatement.

Before I go any further, I want to make clear that I’m not talking about a person who just does parkour. There’s a difference between someone who enjoys to play the game and an athlete who pours their all into training to be the best at what they do. This is true for every sport and discipline, and parkour is no exception. I enjoy playing basketball, but to say that I’m a basketball player would be an insult to the athletes who dedicate their entire livelihoods to the game. As a more direct example, I’ve been doing parkour for a little over a decade now, but it’s only in recent years that I’ve begun training with the goal of establishing myself as a true athlete in the sport - and I still hesitate to call myself an athlete at the professional level.

Back to the point at hand; yes, we spend about 90% of the time failing at what we specialize in. It can definitely be as disheartening as it sounds: the trend among parkour athletes to fall into a hole of self deprecation because of this inevitable part of the process towards progression is at the forefront of our interactions. “I’m trash” or “that was trash” has become one of the most common phrases that I hear practitioners of all levels say. When you spend hours and hours day after day for sometimes weeks at a time attempting the same challenge obsessively, only to have to face the fact that you’re not strong enough or confident enough to complete it at the end of the day, it definitely creeps into your mind that - maybe - you’re not good enough. 

HOWEVER, these failures are indeed necessary for our progression. For example, Darryl is a parkour athlete at the highest and most professional level of the sport, which means that the challenges he often faces are ones that even those of us who know his capabilities question are possible. To watch him attempt each aspect of a challenge with impeccable precision and incomparable technique is to witness a human being who has nearly perfected the art of gravitational manipulation, to the degree of which is physically attainable. It’s impossible to watch his attempts that end in failure and see it as incompetence; the mastery exists regardless of the outcome. We watch and study these movements in order to see what adjustments an athlete of Darryl’s caliber makes in order to apply this knowledge to our own practice.

This is the process of fine tuning. A never ending cycle of adjustments made to fit each scenario and challenge we face.

You try and you fall and then what? You obviously can’t get up and do the same thing you just did because it’ll lead to the same outcome. Instead, you analyze: WHY did I fall? WHAT am I missing? In doing this, you begin to learn from each failure, making it an invaluable part of your athletic development.

And then after 5, 10, or sometimes 50+ attempts spread out over days of work and constant analysis of your own failures, something clicks. And just like that, you unlock the challenge.

Success.

The sweetness of that one moment after however many failures that came before it is the main reason why professional athletes and general practitioners alike continue to push the movement to higher levels of possibility than the founders of our sport could have ever imagined.

That 90% failure rate is what makes the 10% all that much more important. Because without it, there’s no true understanding of the movement. Without it, there’s no real progression to be made.

When you look at each failure as a valuable and necessary part of the process, your perspective on that 90/10 ratio begins to shift. It did for me. It’s a constant process of learning and failing and growing before succeeding. And every success comes with that same fight.

The 10% is worth fighting for.

- Mel Rivera