Sport & Fitness

A mad dash across Marble Arch roundabout or dodging drunken yobs in Soho on a Saturday night may be the closest some of us get to an adrenalin rush in the capital. But many Londoners, together with a growing number of thrill-seekers around the world, are looking for more wholesome ways to get their pulses racing.

It’s a common misconception that aficionados of ‘adrenalin’ or ‘extreme’ sports are lunatics who harbour a death wish. Of course, there’s no denying the inherent element of danger in, say, dangling off a cliff or riding a double overhead wave, but talk to any climber, surfer, skateboarder or traceur (someone who practises parkour) and it becomes clear that these are people who want to live life to the full, not end it prematurely. No sane person runs before they walk in these sports – which means mastering the basics and conditioning yourself both mentally and physically before attempting the more daring feats.

The one cliché that is true, though, is that adrenalin sports are addictive. The rush of completing your first climb or the sense of achievement you feel at the end of an adventure race is indescribable. In fact, you might even find yourself getting a little spiritual about the whole experience.

‘Roaring down the face of a wave is a feeling unlike any other,’ says Ben Farwagi, founder of the London Surf Club. ‘It’s something I’ve come to live for – and it continues to be a thrill after 15 years. It’s better than any drug, and a lot healthier.’ To the uninitiated, such rigorous activities may sound exhausting, but in fact, they can be revitalising – an antidote to stressful, office-bound urban life, whether practised in the city or outside it.

‘Going surfing at the weekend may entail a few hours in the car, but you see amazing countryside and have adventures,’ says Farwagi. ‘And when you get back to work on Monday, while most of your colleagues have spent Saturday and Sunday recovering from their hangovers and just slouching around, you’re healthily exhausted and beaming with life.’

Another likely reason for the rising popularity of adrenalin activities is the sense of community they bring. Far from entering closed cliques, you’ll find yourself engaged with a crew of welcoming and supportive athletes of all levels. This could be why women are showing more enthusiasm for sports that were once male-dominated. Girls-only surfing, skateboarding and snowboarding holidays have taken off over the past few years (Girlie Camps, www.girliecamps.com, does all three), a glossy surf-chick magazine, Cooler, was launched in summer 2005, and last September the first-ever all-female parkour event took place in London.Whatever personal limits – mental or physical – you want to explore, there is likely to be a sport that presents the type of challenge you’re looking for. Here, we’ve listed a selection of the most popular heart-pounding pursuits.

Urban thrills
Country Kicks

Urban thrills

Climbing
London’s mountains may be notable by their absence, but this doesn’t seem to have dampened the enthusiasm for climbing in the capital. There are three main indoor facilities: the Castle, Mile End and the Westway Sports Centre. Each features a wide variety of bouldering walls (free ascent just a few feet from the floor), top-roped climbs and lead routes (the former always secured; the latter offering the potential for the occasional short but exhilarating fall).

Arguably the best indoor climbing wall in the city, the Castle (Green Lanes, N4 2HA, 8211 7000, www.castle-climbing.co.uk) is set inside an imposing Victorian folly. Two floors offer a huge range of top-roped climbs suitable for beginners and experts alike, with excellent crash-matted bouldering walls of varying degrees of difficulty, and a cave with a fully climbable roof and four walls. The Geckos Club (077761 76007) organises courses for children, while regular Women with Altitude sessions are narrowing the gender gap.

Operating out of an old pipe-bending factory and buzzing with an atmosphere all its own, the Mile End Climbing Wall (Haverfield Road, E3 5BE (8980 0289, www.mileendwall.org.uk) is run by serious climbers, the average route presenting a tougher challenge than at most other large-scale installations. At the Westway Sports Centre(1 Crowthorne Road, W10 6RP, 8969 0992, www.nkat.org.uk), you’ll find more than 100 of the best-designed and -maintained climbs in London, with 50 new routes and 50 new boulder problems devised each month. For a more chilling experience, check out Ellis Brigham (3-11 Southampton Street, WC2E 7HA (7395 1010, www.ellis-brigham.com), which contains England’s only indoor ice climbing wall, open Tuesday to Sunday all year round. An eight-metre outdoor ice climbing column joined Somerset House’s seasonal attractions (see p113) in winter 2005, but, unlike the famous ice-skating rink, it’s unconfirmed whether it will make a repeat appearance in winter 2006/7.

Parkour
While boards are necessary equipment for skaters, who surf their way through the concrete jungle, traceurs need only their agility and lightness of foot. In this sense, parkour (see also p15 Leap of faith) can be seen as the purest form of urban sport. There is some debate surrounding the sport’s origins – although most agree that Frenchman David Belle was responsible for developing the discipline in the town of Lisses, just south of Paris. Le parkour, or the art of moving, and ultimately flowing, through your environment, is a bastardisation of parcours, which means ‘course’ and comes from the obstacle courses once used in French military training.

Today, whereas the French traceurs remain relatively secretive, almost a closed circle, the UK scene is exploding. This is thanks in no small
part to Urban Freeflow (www.urbanfreeflow.co.uk), founded in 2003 by Paul Corkery. He and other parkour (PK) enthusiasts had been meeting for weekly sessions in Hackney’s Haggerston Park. In the early noughties, when attendance grew from 20 to more than 100 people every Saturday, Urban Freeflow started organising workshops to teach the basics. Following the 2005 Channel 4 documentary, Jump Britain, featuring the Seidojin team born out of the group, and the subsequent reports of copycat kids launching themselves off the roofs of multi-storey car parks, Urban Freeflow was keen to show the discipline should be practised safely and responsibly. The South Bank has now taken over as the focus for the sport, and more than 70 traceurs meet there weekly to practise their vaults, runs, precisions, jumps, balances and other acrobatic feats. Check out the Urban Freeflow website for a rundown of the techniques, details of PK workshops and to join the forum. Other well-organised groups of traceurs taking the capital by stealth include Team Seishin (www.seishin-parkour.com) and Vauxhall Tribes (www.vauxhalltribes.co.uk).

Skateboarding
It may come in and out of fashion, but skateboarding will always be one of the most challenging and aesthetically inspiring way of telling gravity he’s nothing but a big girl’s blouse. In the late 1980s, when the sport was becoming dominated by increasingly technical tricks and its mainstream popularity was in steep decline, the constellations of concrete skate parks that had appeared in the ’70s were filled in and bulldozed almost overnight. Today, spurred on by a renewed interest in the sport, due in no small part to a certain PlayStation game championed by Tony Hawk, the affable if unofficial people’s ambassador for skateboarding, skate parks are once again being built in and around London. The completely redesigned Cantelowes Skatepark (Cantelowes Gardens, Camden Road, NW1, www.cantelowesskatepark.co.uk) is set to become the hub of the north London skate scene when it reopens in May 2006 as part of a £1.5 million redevelopment of Cantelowes Gardens by Camden Council. South of the river, the Stockwell Skatepark (Stockwell Park Road, SW9, www.stockwellskatepark.com) was resurfaced in November 2005.

The irony is that now, as in the ’70s, some of the best spots to practise tend to be non-designated and often illegal. These places are spread by word of mouth; alternatively, pick up a copy of Sidewalk magazine (www.sidewalk mag.com) to see which locations are featured.
BaySixty6 (formerly the PlayStation Skate Park, Bay 65-66, Acklam Road, W10 5YU, 8969 4669, www.baysixty6.com) has revolutionised the London scene. Sheltered beneath the A40, and lent an apocalyptic air by the traffic thundering overhead, this enormous park includes three half-pipes, a mini-ramp and more funboxes, grind boxes, ledges and rails than you can shake a skateboard at. The enormous variation within the course makes it as suitable for beginners as it is addictive for old soldiers. There’s also a skate shop with plenty of equipment on sale.

If you want to take boarding to another level, you might consider trying a ‘gravity-powered’ activity. Street luge, stand up and butt boarding all basically involve hurtling yourself down steep tarmac roads on skateboard-like contraptions. For more information on the individual sports, as well as details of taster sessions and races, visit the UK Gravity Sport Association’s website (www.ukgsa.org).

Country kicks

Country kicks

Adventure racing
If you’ve previously run a marathon or tackled a triathlon and are searching for a new challenge, then adventure racing could be what you’re looking for. Once you’ve tried it, you may never consider getting from the start to the finish of a race in a mundane manner again. Like so many other adrenalin activities, adventure racing considers itself to be the ‘fastest-growing sport in the UK’ – and the enthusiastic take-up of events such as the now-annual Rat Race Urban Adventure Series (08704 103245, www.ratraceadventure.com), in Bristol, Manchester and Edinburgh, is certainly testament to the sport’s popularity. Sadly, however, there are no plans for a London Rat Race at the moment.

The format of adventure racing varies from event to event, but usually involves elements of such fast-paced and physically demanding activities as mountain biking, kayaking and climbing. Questars (01380 831388, www.questars. co.uk), one of the major organisers of adventure races in rural areas from Hampshire to Wales, runs a three-leg race, which consists of trail running, mountain biking and canoeing. Since we’re talking about distances of up to 24 miles for each section, these events usually take place over a couple of days. And it’s no easy competition.

Working in teams of up to four people (often made up of friends and work colleagues), the participants’ aim is to visit as many checkpoints as possible along a pre-marked course, collecting points up to a maximum of 1,000. Questar holds races between April until October – and places tend to fill up quickly. Check out the Questar website for details of forthcoming events, which are also advertised in Running Fitness magazine. Sleep Monsters (www.sleepmonsters.co.uk) is another online adventure racing community.

Canyoning & coasteering
Canyoneers follow a running river as it travels – often at rapid speeds – through a rocky gorge. Like coasteering, the experience is made up of multiple activities, hence no one should expect to get from A to B without jumping off a few cliffs, swimming through some white water
and plunging into a fair number of rock pools. Add to this a few rock slides, waterfalls and some incredible scenery, and it’s easy to see why canyoning is simultaneously one of the most challenging, draining and rewarding adrenalin sports around. It’s not without risks, but life jackets and helmets are worn by all, and experienced guides know the routes inside out.

ProAdventure (23 Castle Street, Llangollen, Wales LL20 8NY, 01978 861912, www.proadventure.co.uk) organises weekend canyoning courses (also called gorge walking) in North Wales, but it’s worth going the extra mile(s) and capitalising on the advantages of Nae Limits (14 The Cross, Dunkeld, Perthshire, Scotland PH8 0AQ, 01350 727242, www.naelimits.co.uk). This company has exclusive use of the spectacular Craighall Gorge in Scotland – two miles of the River Ericht at its most rapid.

Similarly, coasteering is not so much a single outdoor pursuit as an amalgamation of many. Participants – wetsuited and booted, and buoyed up by an inflatable life jacket – follow the edge of the land hugging the coast, climbing, scrambling, cliff jumping and sea swimming. The sport was developed in Pembrokeshire and is a mainstay of activity organisers around that area. Visit the Adventure Wales website (www.adventure.visitwales.com) for more information, including a database of accredited operators.

Surfing
Surfing is an exhilarating sport, currently experiencing a surge of interest. And dedicated surfers aren’t put off by Britain’s wintry shores. The nearest breaks, in North Devon and Cornwall, require a pilgrimage from London (with a gruelling 4am start to catch the best and least crowded waves), although the introduction of flights from Stansted to Newquay has helped.

Many enjoy the solitary nature of surfing and prefer to head off on their own or with just one or two other people. But there’s no getting away from the fact that, apart from the occasional angry flash of localism, this is one laid-back, sociable, egalitarian sport. Follow surf etiquette at the line-up (don’t drop in on other people’s waves, avoid getting in other surfers’ way) and you’ll maintain the friendships you made while wrestling into your wetsuit in the car park.

Alternatively, get involved with the London Surf Club (www.londonsurfclub.com), which meets on the last Wednesday of every month,
or join one of the excellent weekends run by Big Friday (01637 872512, www.bigfriday.com), which take place during summer and autumn – you can opt for one of the company’s surf and accommodation packages or simply catch a ride from London to the coast on the surf bus.Meanwhile, the Cornwall-based company Wavehunters (Oceans 11, The Terrace, Port Isaac, PL29 3SG, 01208 880617, 0870 242 2856, www.wavehunters.co.uk) specialises in providing short-break surfing trips tailored to the needs of landlocked Londoners.

For kit, visit Low Pressure (23 Kensington Park Road, W11 2EU, 7792 3134, www.lowpressure.co.uk), London’s top surfing shop. The store also produces the excellent Stormrider guide to surf spots in Europe and is a source of lots of useful information. For more information, contact the British Surfing Association (International Surfing Centre, Headland Road, Newquay, Cornwall TR7 1HY, 01637 876474, www.britsurf.co.uk).

Urban Thrills