VIDEO: Nick Maurer: Urban Ninja

Nick Maurer is accustomed to being asked to leave the premises. Whether he’s at a school, or outside an office building, something about his ability to scale walls, and then gracefully tumble off them like a video game character (and stick the landing!), seems to make people a little uncomfortable.

“Some of the cops and security guards in Ridgewood know me by now,” he said, “I’ve explained to them that I’m not hurting anyone, I’m not damaging any property, and sometimes they let me do my thing.”

Maurer is a practitioner of parkour, the physical discipline of getting from one point to another in the most efficient way possible—which may not sound like much, until you see him vault off a ledge, using the momentum to propel himself into a rotating tuck that lands him further than you could have walked in the same amount of time.

Parkour is often practiced on industrial sites or college campuses – anywhere that can offer a diverse selection of obstacles for practitioners to vault, leap, or flip over. The sport is also sometimes termed “free-running,” though there is a debate among enthusiasts whether that is a more aesthetics-focused strain. 

For Maurer, the goal of performing such risky feats is to use his body to its fullest potential, and to find an inner satisfaction.

“I feel like all of us are given this gift here, and it’s capable of so much,” he said. “There’s so many people out there who don’t even realize we have two bones in our forearms instead of one, and we live with this every day…I want to know as much about my body as I can.”

Maurer became interested in the sport after many years of martial arts instruction. One auspicious day, he brought a Jackie Chan movie to a mall kiosk and requested something similar. “[The employee] showed me a bunch more Jackie Chan movies and I was like, ‘Not the kung fu part, the part where he’s jumping around doing cool stunts,’” said Maurer, who was presented with a dvd starring one of the founders of parkour.

“I watched the film, and immediately, I was like ‘That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life,’” he said.

He began training, first with simple jumps onto roadside curbs, until he grew in strength and confidence to attempt more complex movements. The majority of the challenge is mental, he said.

“If I go in thinking about how sacred I am, it’s going to take me forever to do [the stunt],” said Maurer. “If I go in knowing I’m going to get it eventually, I might even get it the next day.”

Maurer has no reservations about jumping, say, a 30 foot gap between the roofs of 2 two-story buildings (like he did last year for a demonstration video), because he has done the same movement countless times at ground-level, between two curbs. 

Still, he knows his limits. “If I’m worried up there, and my heart’s beating fast and I’m uncomfortable, then I’m not going to do it,” he said.

Maurer doesn’t have his sights set on any particularly impressive stunts. Rather, his goal is to spread parkour throughout the population.

“I really want to see parkour take off, and not in a way where people think it’s just foolishly jumping around,” he said. “I’m looking to open parks where we don’t have to trespass or get in trouble with the authorities. I want it to be taught. I want it to be something welcomed.”

He has already helped open some of the first parks in New York City through his work with the free-running group Open Road. Maurer is also involved with New York Parkour, the World Free-Running and Parkour Federation, and the locally-based Team Sanjuu.

Three years ago, he went to London to train with Parkour Generations, and has since traveled the length of the East Coast to attend “jams” (parkour training and workshop events), as well as work with other practitioners he met through Facebook.

“The community is incredible, it’s one of my favorite things about it,” he said. “We’re all one big family all around the world.”

Next year, he hopes to travel to Spain and Russia, where movement styles differ from the U.S. and innovations in the art are being made. Eventually, he wants to finish his degree in exercise science and develop a parkour teaching program that emphasizes personal fitness and draws upon his experience with break dancing and hip-hop.

Maurer may even implement a program in the village. “I was planning on doing classes in Ridgewood, I want to get that started and get a solid schedule down,” he said. He hopes to use profits to develop a park in the area, which he has found is lacking in sufficient practice locations.

“I’ve enjoyed my journey so much, and it’s given me a whole different outlook on life,” he said, “And I want to share that with people.”

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