CLIMBING THE WALLS

PARKOUR STUDENT Shane Lyons, above, keeps his running momentum as he vaults over a small wall behind Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick on Tuesday. Lyons was one of 21 students — including Jamison Cyr, above left, and Alex Reny — of the urban sport focused on moving around obstacles efficiently during the class Tuesday. At left, instructor Curran Ferrey, 18, leads a group of teens through warm-up exercises before their parkour lessons. Dylan Polin, below, a Boston-based parkour instructor, watches India Wilson, left, and Isak Carney, right, perform jumping drills.

Urban gymnast Dylan Polin posed an unusual challenge to a group of teens Tuesday at Curtis Memorial Library.

“If you ran up to this wall, how would you try to get over it normally?”

One by one, the teen trainees of a sport called parkour bounded over a four-foot brick wall near the library’s back entrance. On the first approach, each had a common trait.

“Everyone ran up and slowed down,” Polin said. “We’re going to start getting rid of that fear.”

With a little training Tuesday, those obstacles began to shrink for the 21 teens learning the basics of parkour, derived from French, which is focused on moving efficiently around obstacles.

The sport has evolved around urban landscapes that provide practitioners, called “traceurs” and “traceuses,” with plenty to vault, spring and climb over.

For the three-person Boston-based crew that leads introductory parkour classes around New England, the class in Brunswick represented an inaugural effort to take the urban sport into the most rural state in the country.

But instructor Curran Ferrey, 18, said the sport is more about creativity than finding complex urban landscapes.

“You have to use your imagination and you have to train to see it,” Ferrey said.

Just outside the library, walls and staircases turned into a gymnastic playground as the budding traceurs and traceuses learned special techniques for moving efficiently.

On the library lawn, the parkour students learned to absorb a jump with a special tumbling technique. Around the back of the library, students vaulted with their hands over a small wall.

The goal of Tuesday’s class, sponsored by a grant from the Community Health and Information Partnership (CHIP), was to teach the teens these techniques and to encourage more active lifestyles. Parkour, with roots that trace back to France in the 1920s, emphasized collaboration and overcoming individual challenges rather than competition. But the lessons could have other applications as well.

“We’re trying to get beyond obstacles without stopping,” said Polin, who also runs a website at neparkour.com dedicated to information about the sport in New England.

Parkour student Alex Reny said he was interested in the sport before, but one of the biggest obstacles was finding others to join in the urban acrobatics.

During Tuesday’s class, those others were just a hop, skip and a jump away.

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