I’m not exactly what you’d call an extreme sports guy. I don’t follow the X-Games, I’ve never been snowboarding, and I’ve owned two skateboards in my life—one was made of plastic and had removable handlebars, and the other was a $12 “Variflex” board from Target whose wheels were missing ball bearings. I also just used the phrase “extreme sports”, which I think immediately disqualifies me from having useful opinions on things.

All that being said, I still have a fascination with some of the things people can convince their bodies to do, sometimes with the aid of equipments (skateboards, bikes, etc.) and sometimes without any assistance but their own agility.

Take, for instance, Parkour, which you could call “extreme urban running”. The idea is to get from point A to point B in as fluid and efficient manner as is possible. The result is the sort of thing you see Jackie Chan doing all the time in his movies:

Some more here. These aren’t Jackass guys running into walls at top speed (amusing as that may be): these are people with a plan, whose goal is to not get hurt.

But there’s more than just Parkour.

Check out Danny MacAskill’s street biking:

What I love is the (appearance of, at least) precision he’s able to achieve with his moves. It’s not enough that he jumped over a wall or did a flip off a tree—he meant to do it exactly the way it happened, and you can tell.

Similarly, Rodney Mullen is a skateboarder who can do some amazing things with the board:

I’m particularly a fan of the move you see around 2:56 (I believe it’s called a “darkslide”)—it’s looks so effortless, but I also can’t imagine what it takes to get your feet into a position to make it happen, let alone being able to flip things back to continue on to the next thing. It’s the continuation of motion, accented by flourishes, that I really like when watching this kind of stuff.

Of course, all of that, cool as it is, is not nearly so jaw-dropping as wingsuit basejumping, something that breaks my brain:

I’m not sure what there is to say about wingsuit basejumping except that the people that do it are insane, and that it makes for some incredible video.

I’m not sure if this counts as pop culture or not, so I’ll bring it back around.

There’s a game for the PS3 that I’ve played (the demo) called “Mirror’s Edge”, which is essentially Parkour in video game form. The parts of it that I’ve played are extremely fun, but I think I need to upgrade the TV to an HD widescreen to get the full effect. Check out the actual gameplay footage:

As I’m sure you’re hoping, there is a point in time where you need to leap from a building and catch a helicopter’s landing skid. Awesome.

Finally, there’s a really good documentary about the origins of skateboarding called Dogtown and Z-Boys. Here’s a trailer:

It’s interesting to see the evolution of current street skateboarding from the surfing-inspired twisting moves the Z-Boys made as their trademark.

Now I must go back to programming computers. wistful sigh