Troyes is one of those cities most people in parkour have never heard of, but the ones who have been keep coming back. It sits about an hour and a half south of Paris, far enough away that it doesn't get the casual tourist traffic, close enough that someone in the community will mention it at the right moment and suddenly the plan crystallises. A week in Troyes. Just the crew, the city, and however much time we wanted to spend moving.
What makes Troyes work as a training ground is the specific contradiction of its architecture. Medieval timber frame buildings from the 16th century sit directly alongside brutalist concrete structures built in the 1970s. Old Town has narrow pedestrian streets with uneven surfaces and natural lines that demand precision. Then you turn a corner and find concrete multi-storeys, modern plazas, and flat roofs that stretch out like a skate park designed by accident. It's the kind of city where every ten minutes of walking presents you with a completely different training problem. You could spend two hours on one street without covering much ground.
The gathering happened almost entirely through word of mouth. No schedules, no event organiser, no formal structure. Practitioners started arriving mid-January: two from Belgium, someone from Germany, four from London, a couple from France. By the third day we had maybe fourteen people moving through the city together. Different skill levels, different styles. What united everyone was that particular type of focus you get when you're in a place that actually fits how your body wants to move.
The best sessions were the ones where everyone just moved. Nobody calling spots, nobody arranging shots, just flowing between the concrete and stone with a camera rolling somewhere in the background.
The sessions followed a rhythm we didn't plan. Wake up, walk the city, find something interesting, spend two hours on it. Lunch somewhere cheap. Afternoon exploration. By evening someone would suggest heading toward a particular corner or plaza and maybe four or five of us would go, or maybe everyone would show up. The lack of structure was the whole point. In normal competitions or organised events, everyone's locked into the same energy. Here, if you wanted to drill precisions on a low wall for an hour while other people filmed bigger features nearby, that was fine. If you wanted to sit and watch, that was fine too.
What made it special wasn't the spots, though Troyes has good ones. It wasn't even the filming, though we came away with footage worth editing. What stuck was the simplicity of it. Seven days in a medieval and brutalist city with people who move the same way you do, no agenda beyond seeing what the streets offered and documenting it because documentation matters. No competition pushing us toward bigger tricks. No social media angles to chase. Just people moving and community building around that movement. That's what Troyes gave us, and it's why everyone's already talking about when we go back.
