The Commons

A Conversation with Chris Roff and Ritto, hosted by Egg:

In anticipation for the release of Maven, I sat down with Chris (@freethemotion) and Ritto (@whyburrito) to chat about their approach to movement, the process of making the video, and the training dynamic the two of them share.

Egg: How are you guys? How’s the shoulder doing Chris?

Chris: Ehh definitely still not better

Ritto: Bro I kicked the shit out of him by accident yesterday

Chris: Yeah he got me right in the collar bone

Egg: damn doing what?

Ritto: We were loading some wood into the back of a truck and I konged up the truck. And then I was standing there and was about to kong again, but when I konged he konged, and you know how you like kick backwards to kong? Straight to his shoulder

Chris: straight up to my shoulder thats messed up

Egg: what about you Ritto how’s your body

Chris Roff

Ritto: its good, just got a bit of a wrist injury. I think its because I broke my wrist in 2014 and now its giving me problems

Chris: yeah you’re getting old (Both laugh)

Egg: Well to get into things, I went back in preparation for this to try and find old Chris videos, and I could be wrong but I think the last time you had a solo video was six years ago, does that sound about right?

Chris: (laughs) How did you find that?

Egg: I just searched Chris Roff Freethemotion on youtube and found your old channel. You looked super baby but you were still hitting some pretty Chris style movement.

Chris: Haha yeah, its definitely changed a lot since then but I had to start somewhere.

Egg: In the caption for the Maven trailer it said “the movement in Maven would have happened whether there was a camera there or not” and I feel like from my experience training with ya’ll that statement is very true to your training mentality. I find this dynamic pretty unique. I see a lot of people in parkour who seem to be chasing external validation, and you guys really seem to be out here just out of pure love for moving. Would love to get into that a bit and what motivates you guys.

Chris: I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Recently I was talking to somebody about the difference between training for validation versus training for competition or training to get a clip. For me I just go out and I try to be better than I was before, but I also try to have no expectations of what I want to do when I train. I just see what my body wants to do. If you have ideas before you go to a spot and you don’t complete them, then you’re just disappointed. The trick to not disappointing yourself is having zero expectations and just going out to have fun.

Ritto: You were talking to me about that. Cuz I was saying like competition is awesome, but people really do dedicate their body for building it up and then destroying it at a competition. I just want to train, I never want to destroy myself. The hype of a competition can make you do things you might regret, things you’re not ready for yet. Like what Chris was saying, I just don’t really have expectations. When I pull up to a spot, even if I’m not feeling the spot, I’m like there’s something I can do here that I never would have thought of doing ahead of time.

Egg: Going off of that mentality of approaching movement with no expectations and prioritizing having fun, I’m really curious about what it felt like to work on a big project like Maven, and having dedicated filmers. You even said earlier Chris that you don’t like going out with the goal of getting a clip. How did you maintain your approach to moving during the filming of Maven.

Philly Love <3

Chris: All of that goes to Noah, Ethan, and Naomi. They really made it as easy as possible for me. I just did the same thing I always do. Sometimes I did go out trying to get something specific which at times was a bit stressful because I’m not used to doing that. For the most part they made it so easy. We’d go out to a random spot, and I would just train how I normally do. Then they would be like “that could be a clip” and I’d be like “okay sick”. I didn’t have to go out of my way to figure anything out, they just did all of it.

Ritto: Until the ender.

Chris: Yeah the ender was stressful. We just kept getting kicked out of every spot we tried to get my ender at. Had like 5 different enders planned and none of them worked out.

Egg: I remember when you were in Colorado you were chasing one of those five, but I think what you ended up going with was from Discourse?

Chris: Yeah we were planning on using that one from Colorado but when we laid it out it just didn’t fit quite right in the edit. At the end they decided to use the clip from discourse and I think it fit much better.

Egg: I saw an earlier draft when Noah was visiting us, and that clip wasn’t in there at all.

Chris: Yeah I asked Noah to put it in there. Noah said watching that clip made him anxious so he didn’t want to edit with it, he really didn’t want to watch it over and over again. But I was like I’d like it in there to be honest.

Egg: mmm I wanted to ask you about your mental state around doing really scary stuff like that. I see how you stay playful and have no expectations when you move, but a decent amount of time you end up doing really scary shit. Like when you were attempting an ender here in Colorado that challenge seemed super spooky to me, but per usual you seemed really calm. How do you stay so level headed?

Chris: I actually want to do a workshop on fear because I feel like I could teach it well, I just need to figure out the words. I relate every move or jump I do to something similar that I’ve done before. So if its a 12 foot jump to a rail at height, all I think about is that I’ve done the same distance to a rail before, just without a drop on the other side. All I have to do is hit the bounce back, and progress up from there. For me its about trust in the movement, because of how many times I’ve done the same thing over and over. I think its about confidence and being able to play it in your head how you’ve done it before. Everything I do I try to relate to something else that I’ve done before.

Egg: I feel like that really speaks to how often ya’ll go out. Because you guys are doing it for fun, all the fucking time, you have a ton of data. You’ve done a lot of moves a lot of times. Those bigger challenges don’t have to feel completely new even if they are scaled up versions of what you’ve done in the past.

Chris: That is facts. We have so much stored data from going out pretty much every day.

Ritto: That’s why I don’t really like training with a lot of people. It feels like pressure to do something I might not feel ready to do. When I train with Chris there isn’t that pressure and I feel like I can do a lot.

Chris: Sometimes we go out to find spots and just do a huge loop and don’t actually do any parkour. But we are still outside, looking and thinking about different challenges.

Egg: That’s another thing I’ve noticed about y’all. You spend a lot of time theorizing about challenges that you are not necessarily even going to do. A lot of “this would be cool” and “this would be sick” without needing to attempt them to enjoy the thought.

Ritto: We do that all the fucking time.

Chris: People are always like “That is the most fucked challenge, how and why did you even think of that.” Five years ago I was looking at a bunch of challenges and at the time they were absolutely impossible, like no way I was even gonna get close. This year I’ve checked off so many of those challenges because I had put them in my head. Eventually, whether its months or years later, I’m gonna look at it again and be able to do it. I’m never rushing to get a challenge done, but because its in my head Ill end up doing similar challenges, and when I go look at it again Im like “oh I’ve done something just like this” and it feels more approachable. It plays back into how I try to relate every challenge. It feels so good to go back and check off old challenges.

Egg: That feels related to where your motivation comes from, how you seem to strive for internal validation. It seems like you guys like to prove something to yourself

Chris: Absolutely

Ritto: We talk about that all the time. Moving is like crack. When you don’t do parkour for a while you’re like “damn I need to move”. I know for me I started moving to not think about what life was like for me at the time.

Chris: For me movement was like the one thing in my life I could have control over. Something I could take out my emotions with and use to feel better.

Ritto: Like its something we know can’t be taken from us.

Egg: Y’all touched on this a little bit, but I wanted to talk more about your training dynamic together. Ritto you said you’re not a huge fan of training in big groups. I do think there is a big difference though between solo training and training with a partner. You can start to develop a certain approach and the energy can bounce off of one another. Would love to hear more about what you like about training with each other.

Chris: The new style I have, that wasn’t in those old videos you watched, really came from you and from Ritto. You helped me figure out how to play with axis more, and Ritto introduced me to his ukemi style. It always amazed me the way he can like fall into lines. I started incorporating that more. I lot of my ideas come from stuff Ritto did. Ill see something he does and I can’t do it the same way, but ill be like “what if I try it like this instead?”. That changes the look of it and makes it more my own.

Ritto: Its funny. Ill do something and you’re like “what that’s crazy” and I’m like bro could totally do it more like this. He’s way better at overcoming mental barriers than me. He’s like my little lab rat in movement sometimes, ill give him an idea and hell do it and then make a whole line super fast.

Ritto: Its easy to train with Chris because its not like strictly parkour. We lived together for a while. Its always nice to do something you love with the people that you love. We can talk about anything. Sitting down after doing a few tricks and just talking about life. Feels seamless to shift between moving, and talking together.

Chris: I think that’s why the dynamic is so good, because its not just about doing parkour together. We work together, live together, been friends for years.

Ritto: We were talking about this a few nights ago. We are each others longest standing friendship.

Egg: I see how you two bring that love for one another to the session. Parkour is about a lot more than doing tricks, but it can be hard to feel that in certain group settings. Having somebody you know so well and really care about can make it a lot easier to feel it.

Egg: What’s it like training in Philly?

Ritto: The representation goes so hard. I’m not even from Philly I’m from Puerto Rico but when I moved here I fell in love with it. Its the city of brotherly love. When I started doing parkour I noticed how it could bring people together.

Chris: When people come to Philly we want them to get involved in the city. Not just going to a spot and the coming back home. We them to go out and feel the city, truly experience it. We want people to interact with the city in more ways than just training. The spots are everywhere here so you can walk throughout the city from spot to spot. I feel like that helps people get more immersed here.

Chris: On the other side of things, the cops here are absolutely horrible. We get kicked out of everywhere.

Ritto: It’s not just cops, there’s a lot of people here who really don’t like what we do. I think it might just be a Philly thing, but here people just don’t say hello or good morning here. Ill say good morning to my boss and I’m like “you’re not gonna say it back?” And he’s like “it’s Philly why the fuck would I say good morning, I’m at work” I feel like people here are more bold about confronting us. Like bro I’m just trying to train.

Chris: Sometimes well be training on playgrounds and people are like “hey you can’t be doing that here, we pay taxes” and I’m like “yeah so do we!”

Ritto: When Mikesh was here we stood out in the rain with this one guy who called the cops four times for us training at a playground. He pulled up and was like “aren’t you the same assholes who I yelled at last week?” He was talking about how we were going to lower his property value.

Egg: Do you feel like that directness lets you make more of a statement through doing parkour?

Ritto: It kind of fuels into the purpose of my training. I move for me, and I’m not going to let people get in my way. I’m doing my own thing, why are you worried about what I’m doing. Its a Philly thing.

Egg: There’s that part in the video where that cop is like “I think I’ve seen you around here before” Do y’all have a bit of a reputation?

Ritto: We’re on the homeland security watchlist. That happened back in 2017 from trying to climb the tallest building in Philly while it was under construction. We scouted it for months. We were scouting on Christmas Day and then all of sudden there were cops everywhere. They searched Chris, did some dumb racist shit with my id. We were wearing Storror hoodies and when they stopped us they were like “hey we know that group” and said Storror were terrorists. We pop up on the watchlist now.

Chris: I’m surprised we can fly on planes.

Chris: UPenn is our biggest spot, and its right behind our house. Its got the most spots so we’re always over there. But because we’re there so much, all the cops there know who we are. That’s where that cop in the video was. They’ve escorted us off campus several times. They’re like don’t come back. And I’m super up front with them, I’m like I live right next door I am going to come back. Like when I’ve been repping a line all day, and they’re like you gotta leave I ask them what time they got off work. I’m going to go back no matter what you say. I prefer to be honest, I don’t want to tell them I won’t come back when they’ll probably see me again tomorrow.

Egg: I really appreciate how real you are in those interactions, I feel like other people either completely back down or get super aggressive and confrontational, but you seem to stand your ground without being rude about it. Like when you were getting kicked attempting an ender here in Colorado and the security guard said that he was just doing his job, and you were like “This is my job, I’m out here doing my job too!” You explain to them how important this is to you and stand up for what you believe in without being a jerk about it.

Egg: Do you have any stories behind certain clips?

Chris: I can’t remember any clips to be honest. My memory is garbage. Lemme pull some up to jog my memory. Oh there’s kind of a funny one behind the line with the side pre to the rail. I really just wanted to do the side rail pre, and then I saw the drop pre and was like I want to do a whole line and end it with the drop pre. It was really meaty and since I was doing a line into it I only wanted to do it once. Right before I went Jonas told Noah that I was gonna stick it first try. And I was like yeah “Hell yeah I’m gonna stick it first try so I don’t have to do it again” and Noah was like “wait you’re gonna stick it?” And I was like “yeah I’m gonna stick it.” It took me a few tries to get the spin out of the side rail pre. But once I did that correctly I just flashed everything else and stuck the drop pre. I walked up to the camera and was like “see I told you I would stick it first try” I thought that was pretty cool because Noah didn’t even think I was going to stick that jump, let alone first try.

Egg: You’ve got great awareness of what you can and can’t do.

Chris: Yeah took 12 years (laughs)