Meet Fernando Arce

Today we’d like to introduce you to Fernando Arce.

Fernando, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I started training parkour & freerunning in 2008 after getting fed up with people asking me that since I’m a black belt in a martial art if I can do backflip. TaeKwonDo was my base sport from age 4.5 to 22. Explaining to school kids over and over that having a black belt does not mean I’m automatically a ninja who can flip over their opponents. So one day a friend of mine and I took a twin bed spring mattress, held it down to the roof of my car with our arms, drove to a park with a grass field and I began mentally prepping. YouTube had been around for a few years at that point with a lot of fail videos more than successful ones. I didn’t want to land on my neck and seriously injure myself like I’ve seen in so many other videos. After several attempts of flipping on the mattress, then off the mattress to grass, I finally gathered up the courage to throw a backflip on solid ground. Once successfully landed and filmed I craved more. Going back to YouTube to find other parkour athletes, rewinding clips to analyze their techniques, finding out what “open gym” sessions are in gymnastics gyms, it was the opening of Pandora’s box that could not be stopped.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
With my athletic background and access to open gym sessions nearly every day of the week, the road to where I am now has been a smooth one with some ups and downs of course. Finding like-minded athletes at the gym I went to allowed all of us to push each other in the sport and to train more outside as a team. Filming our training sessions and travel experiences connected us to a larger community on the internet. Getting recognized online for our skills then asked to perform for high schools, universities, local tv networks, and promotional videos raised so many feelings of creativity, vindication, and freedom.

Of course there were many struggles with young athletes in a fairly new sport. Getting kicked out of locations by business owners, security guards, police authority… to them it looked like a bunch of hooligans jumping around obstacles that they could get injured on and become a liability. Even when we respond in a calm and respectful manner the outcome could be anywhere from the property owner, or security guard giving us a few more moments at the spot to continue our training/filming all the way to receiving a restraining order from stepping foot onto a block of property for a year. Being young and hungry for more, none of those challenges ever stopped me from continuing on to better myself as an athlete.

We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
Being a professional parkour & freerunning athlete allows me to be involved in almost every way in and around this up-and-coming sport. I’ve coached in numerous local gyms, competed in many competitions around the country with a couple around the world, I certify other athletes across the nation to become insurable parkour coaches, I’ve live hosted international competitions, and during the summer months I coach parkour at one of the largest action sport camps on Earth to the youth of the world.

I love taking my experiences and knowledge I’ve acquired throughout my years and showing others that correcting one little aspect of technique can have a major impact on completing a skill. It brings me so much joy seeing someone who has struggled on one move for an extended period of time have it finally click in their brain and successfully achieving their goal with just a few words from an athlete who did not have a coach in their early stages of training. Years and years of overcoming mistakes and learning little tricks here and there all accumulated and transferred to someone else that would’ve struggled maybe indefinitely and possibly given up on something they once loved. Brings me an immense amount of satisfaction.

Contact Info:

• Email: 1fernandoarce@gmail.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/fernando_arce
• Facebook: facebook.com/1FernandoArce
• Other: youtube.com/diablofernando

Image Credit:
Emily Ibarra, James Kelley, Ryan LeCours, Brent Vaught

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