The Commons

A conversation with Megan Mcqueen (@meganmcqueen_) and Zach Wiegart (@zwiegs) hosted by Egg Klickstein (@klickstein)

Egg: I’d love to start off by just hearing more about why you love parkour and why it is important to you.

Megan: That’s such a hard question, it’s like asking “why do you love your mom?” Parkour has been the one largely consistent thing through my entire life. I don’t really remember much from before I started parkour. I was five when I started training, and that’s not really a time I remember super vividly. So it feels like parkour sort of raised me. Especially staying at the same gym the entire time, and now working at the gym, I’ve just grown up around this place and its been a second home for eleven years.

Egg: I actually had another question written down about what it was like growing up at apex. I’m fascinated by what I consider to be the first generation gym kids raised in proper parkour gyms. When I started the only parkour gym I knew of in the US was Tempest, and the phenomena of people like you starting parkour at a young age with proper instruction didn’t really exist yet. I would love to hear more about the effect of Apex and its community on your life and your training. 

Megan: Starting parkour as a kid, especially super young, it’s not super accessible. Outdoor training is great, but its hard to just go outside and start learning parkour especially as a baby. Having the designated space to train with amazing coaches who I would see every week really helped form my skills. For example the other day I was working on some front flips in the gym and somebody was like “your tech is really good, who taught you front flips?” And I was like “nobody, I’ve just been throwing them on trampolines and air track enough times to figure it out.” Having this facility to safely progress around a welcoming community helped me form a lot of skill. Like it doesn’t feel weird or scary to just walk on a rail now. But then I think “thats not a skill most people have been learning since they can walk.” 

Baby Megan konging at Apex Denver

Egg: Moving toward talking about the documentary, I would love to start by asking how you two first met?

Zach: I’m her coach (laughs)

Megan: Ok well, I remember you were a teenager who trained here— 

Zach: I was a teenager who trained here. I am also a gym kid, I started training at the first Apex Denver within the first few years of it opening. So I grew up here in this gym, and when I was a teenager here Megan started training here. 

Megan: When I was a kid training here there were lot of older kids I would look up to and be like “wow this is crazy”. I remember Zach and this guy named Evan training here a lot, and for some reason in my childhood mind I thought you were the same person, and I thought your name was Evan.

Zach: Ohhh I remember that! 

Megan: I would always call you Evan. Up until maybe five years ago I would still call Zach Evan. 

Egg: So are you still coaching Meghan?

Zach: Yeah, I am still her coach currently. I’m the head coach at Apex and one of the main programs I run is our teen team program. That’s basically all the kids who grew up here and are just cracked and better than me at parkour now. I help facilitate a space for them to train and continue progressing, and that’s what Megan does. 

Megan: He still flexes on us though.

Zach: Every once in a while I have to.

Egg: One thing I’m curious about is what the role of coaching looks like when somebody like you Megan is really into competitive parkour?

Megan: Honestly I feel like my coaches mostly just help me calm down. Like at SPL when I had the false start, my coaches weren’t really telling me to run really fast or which strides to do, they were more just telling me that it was going to be okay. Because I was like crying in the corner, I was not doing well after that. 

I feel like Zach isn’t as into speed parkour as I have grown to be, but you are still able to point out certain aspects of a route that I could focus more on. I feel like you know parkour well enough to give me good advice even though you’re not really into speed. 

Zach: I think at a certain point when you are coaching high level parkour athletes, you’re not really teaching them how to do parkour anymore. You are just helping them expand their vision, and helping them contend with their mind. 

Megan: Exactly.

Zach: It’s like “I know you know how to do this” I just have to help you get past whatever block is there in your mind. 

Egg: That’s so interesting to me. My experience coaching parkour was essentially just teaching specific skills, like how to do a kong. I’m jealous of your experience of coaching where you primarily show up in a supportive role. It seems like a deeper relationship, almost more of like a mentor. 

Megan: I feel like I’ve grown up with a lot of my coaches. I mean we’ve been in the gym together for almost a decade. Other coaches like Santos example, while he is still my coach we also just go out and train together.

Zach: There’s a moment in the film that I think describes this picture perfectly, where Santos and Meghan are walking up for her to do that drop off the bridge, and he tells her “you just gotta trick your body into believing you’re confident, and you are.” I mean at a certain level that’s just how you do parkour. You just got to believe in yourself and go for it. 

Megan: I remember one time Santos and I went out to do a big roof gap. We went out at like 6am because it was on top of a business, and we didn’t really want them to get mad at us. We get up there and he’s like “do you want me to do it first Megan?” And I was like “you know what? No. I think I’m just gonna do it quickly.” Neither of us had really done a proper roof gap like this before, and even though he was still my coach on it, it felt like we really just conquered it together. He’s been my coach for so long but now we’re just like friends and peers. 

Megan and Santos scouting a challenge

Zach: I think that’s the beauty of the parkour gyms we have now that kids can grow up in. That team class, I’ve been teaching them since they were like 10 or 11 years old when I was a teenager. And now we’re all just friends. A lot of them have surpassed me, which has been honestly super cool to see them continue pursuing parkour so hard. 

Egg: I feel like Apex has been really successful at fostering a genuine community. I think its a common shortcoming in other parkour gyms I’ve been to. It’s really cool to see the way this space has brought in a new generation and properly enveloped them into the pk scene. 

Egg: Where did the initial idea for this project come from? Zach did you come to Megan or vice versa?

Zach: It started with me. I’ve been really into photography for a lot of years and had dipped my toe a bit into making videos. I decided I really wanted to make a doc. I had never made a documentary before, and very naively I thought it wouldn’t be that big of a job (laughs). I was super wrong about that. 

I knew Megan, and I got a sense that there was probably a good story there, and I wanted my first doc to be a story that was meaningful to me personally. I’m passionate about parkour and the mountains, and with the intersection of Mel’s story there was a powerful intersection of both those things here for me. So I think I just asked Megan if she’d be interested in making a film and she said yes.

Megan: I’ll be honest, I thought you were joking. I was like “oh yeah that would be really cool”. And then when we started filming I was like “wait we’re like actually gonna try to do this?” (laughs). 

Zach: Like oh we’re not just making a training video, we’re making like a film.

Egg: Did you have any reservations going into the filming process around sharing such a personal story?

Megan: I was really glad to share it because I think its an important thing to share and talk about. It wasn’t a reservation, but I do remember during our first interview for the film Zach was asking me some questions and I was like “wow I haven’t really talked about what I’ve gone through like ever.” I honestly hadn’t told this story and getting into it I was crying, and like even now I’m having a bit of a moment because I didn’t fully realize until that first interview that if we hadn’t realized what was going on I could have died. If we had waited three more days I could have gone into a coma. That’s just a really sobering reality that I don’t think I realized until we started doing this. Like I didn’t have reservations until we started and I then I was like “wow I should probably talk about this so I can get it out of my system”. 

Egg: Did you feel like for a lot of the chunk of your life that was covered in the doc that as you were going through it you weren’t necessarily thinking about it on a larger scale? Like sitting down to lay it all out was a pretty intense moment?

Megan: Yeah, it felt a little rough. 

Egg: For you Zach as the film maker, how planned out was the narrative of the film at the beginning? You were saying you knew Megan and were familiar with her story. Being in a position to help somebody else tell their story is an interesting place to be. 

Zach: I jumped into online film school to make this film, it was with an awesome organization called the art of documentary. So I learned a ton from them, and started thinking about story structure and how to approach documentary film making. I was very rigid about it at the beginning. Like “its gonna be this and then this and then this”. But the further I got the more I started throwing iterations out. I think with documentary story telling it has to be free flowing. When you are following somebody’s story for a year like I did with Megan, I never could have known what would happen during the filming back when we started. A huge turning point in the story arc was her false start at SPL coinciding with getting Crohn’s. I never could have known that at the beginning. But that moment happened and I saw this connection and was like “oh this is really compelling and is going to fit perfectly.”

I’d almost say that pre-production was the hardest part, just because of how much I was learning and how much I was processing. In the early interviews Megan gave me so much of her story which I really valued, but I was also like “man how do I turn this into something cohesive?” What parts really need to be delivered in the narrative.

Megan: I also got Crohn’s during the process of filming this technically?

Zach: Did you actually?

Megan: Yeah we first talked about the project December of 2022, and I got diagnosed in February of 2023. 

Zach: Wow I didn’t even realize that, that changed things for sure.

Megan: I remember thinking “ohhh women in parkour” and then you were like “you have auto immune diseases” and I was like “oh yeah, I do. That’s crazy”

Egg: I’m curious for both of you if your relationship outside of the project and your relationship of film maker and subject ever felt complicated. With the subject matter being so personal did it ever feel difficult to move between those different roles? Trying to show up as a friend but also working to construct a narrative whilst you are experiencing your life in real time?

Zach: It never really felt like something to navigate.

Megan: Yeah.

Zach: That isn’t even something I thought about until you said it. We just kept training, kept hanging out, kept being friends. And when stuff needed to be done for the film I’d just say “hey there’s something I need to ask you for this scene” and you’d always be like “yeah sounds good”.

Megan: “can we also train afterwards?”

Zach: (laughs) yeah we’d go out and have like a two hour session and then I’d be like “alright this is a good place to get this shot lets just knock this out real quick”.

Megan: I do feel like we became closer friends during the process.

Zach: Oh absolutely. I just really appreciate how vulnerable you’ve been through this process, I know its been a lot. 

Megan: My blood sugar is running low, I’m gonna quickly grab skittles and then we can continue.

Zach: (laughs) That’s on brand.

…………

Egg: I want to talk a little more about speed parkour as like a parkour genre, and your interest in it. I think its kind of a less popular style of movement, and it was a pretty central component to the film. 

Zach: Less popular everywhere expect for Apex

Megan: Yeah, honestly that’s true. Part of it has just been that Apex is like a speed place. Not to say that we don’t train style here but I’ve just been raised on the speed. I started taking time trials when I was like 8. The first comp I went to and registered as an athlete was when I was 8 or 9. I didn’t end up competing in that one because I had a breakdown at the start. I was about to go and then I was like “ahhh I can’t do it”. 

Something about it just feels correct to my brain. It feels safe but also not. When it comes to style, I just don’t really like to flip and it can just feel really out of control. I’ve seen so many people hurt themselves from pushing too far with style. Speed feels like the right amount of “wow I have to run really fast and do these scary jumps at the same time. But also I don’t have to do those jumps if I really don’t want to, I could just do the long route and climb up this awful wall @spl”. I have been getting a bit more into skill lately though, its really fun.

Zach: Yeah you really have been pushing your skill challenges. 

Egg: As a central theme of the doc, I wanted to hear more about the role your training plays in your relationship body in the context of having auto immune diseases. What does training do for you and your brain?

Megan: So I actually had a comp last night. I’ve been having a really bad Crohn’s flare up right now because I don’t have enough medication and the insurance company won’t give us more. This flare up has caused constant knee and ankle pain. Even when I don’t train it just hurts, and when I do train it also hurts. I was talking with someone last night and they were like “shouldn’t you not be competing if its hurting this badly?” And I was like “yeah but like the pain doesn’t stop when I stop training, and if I stop training I’m just gonna be sad”. Genuinely training mitigates sadness about having sickness. When I’m training I’m like “wow I’m so cool, I just did this cool jump up here. I’m so cool and I don’t have a bunch of sickness.” (laughs). I do think if I did stop training for like a month the pain would be slightly better but in my brain I’m like “even if the training is probably making the pain in my leg worse, if I stop training the mental pain will be much worse”. Last night I chose to compete in the Men’s skill comp as well as the Women’s just because I enjoy training. There was this one challenge I genuinely didn’t think I could do. It was a drop to plyo up to something with a big drop on the other side. I felt like I had no hope of doing it, but on my 4th attempt I bounced it and I was like “wait its a thing”. Once I got it after a few more attempts I had so much dopamine, I was like “oh my god I just did that thing I didn’t think I could do. Training is so cool. My leg hurts. Training is so cool.” (laughs)

Egg: There’s a line in the film where you talk about needing training to deal with your health issues. The physical pain versus the mental or emotional pain. I think regardless of whether somebody has auto immune diseases or not, a lot people in parkour can resonate with that feeling. 

Zach: I think that translates outside the world of parkour too, especially in the action sports world. The ways that we move directly correlate to the things that we’re struggling with. I think that’s a really valuable theme of the film. Like how do you walk that line. We have to contend with the reality of our pain, but movement can be a really powerful tool to help us do that.

Egg: Definitely. I want to ask a bit about Mel and the support that you’ve had from her. I don’t meet a lot of parents that really understand the importance of parkour for mental health. It’s really cool to have a mom that trains, as well as her own experience around the need to push ourselves regardless of circumstances. What was it like growing up with Mel as a mom?

Megan: This is going to be an anecdote. Recently on the teen team, we’ve added a bunch of new members. They are newer into the parkour scene. It’s the first time we’ve added new members in two years, and last time we added new members was when we made the team, and it was just everyone who grew up here at apex. We’ve always just gone out and trained together, like it doesn’t feel weird to just go out and do roof gaps and stuff. Adding the new members, I’ve had this consideration where I think about how they are still being dropped off by their parents and I feel like I’m the one taking them out to do these sketchy things. And then I had a moment where I was like “well my mom was dropping me off to do the roof gaps”. (laughs). Mel really is her own breed of mom. She just really understands my limits, 

Like the other week I wanted to do this five story descent to a pole slide. I couldn’t find anybody to come film me, and I just really wanted to do it so I was like “Hey mommm, can you please come out and film this for me”. So I brought her out with me, I did it, got down, and she goes “I’ll be honest I was just holding the camera up looking away because I couldn’t force myself to watch you do that but I also knew that you could do it.” I respect that, and her for agreeing to film me while also respecting her limits. 

Megan and her mom Mel walking to SPL

Zach: Having that mom brain being like “nope”

Megan: “My child is climbing off of a 5 story building” 

Egg: In the context of this film and your story, I feel like your dynamic with each other says a lot about how to properly give support to the people you love. Whether it’s family or a friend, when we are struggling I think supporting our passions is one of the best ways to help. That was really palpable for me in the film. 

Megan: Another thing for me, is that I really don’t let my mom help me much with diabetes. I do kind of take it on a solo journey. There have been times where I’ve been so down and out that I’ve needed her to help but a lot of the times I feel like I need to prove to myself that I can deal with it on my own. She’s like only had to give me three shots ever. She’s seen how the only way to really support me is through supporting my interests. 

Egg: What do you hope people take away from the film?

Megan: For me what I want people to take away from it, is that you can really do anything. There have been so many moments in my life where I probably shouldn’t have been able to keep training or other people thought that I shouldn’t have. Even starting out, as a little girl in parkour. There were no other little girls around. I’ve just grown up around all the boys and that definitely would have been something that would lead a lot of girls to quit. Thankfully I did have good female role models. Now being older, and developing Crohn’s and diabetes, realizing that I could become a role model for other little girls as well as people with diabetes and Crohn’s. Understanding that there’s this loop with role models. If you get a role model, and keep going because of them, then eventually you might become someone else’s role model. I feel like it shows that you can do a lot if you put your mind to it. It’s not just physical in parkour, its a lot of mental. 

Megan hitting an iconic Colorado roof gap

Zach: Its funny, but the first place I ever heard this was actually in your dad’s book. 

Megan: (laughs)

Zach: “argue for your limitations enough and sure enough they’ll be yours.” I think especially in our cultural moment, people will run into a wall and one of two things will happen. They’ll either keep slamming into the wall until they’re exhausted and burned out and just quit. Or they turn around and decide they can’t go that way. Very few people will take a step back from the wall and think “ok how can we do this”. I think for me that’s one of the most important things for people to get from this film. That regardless of the challenges you face, there’s a path forward for you. I want people to feel encouraged by Megan’s story. Like “damn okay, maybe there is a way to make this work.” And not only that there is a way but that it is so worth it. So worth it for those things to not be what defines you. The log line for the film during pre-production was that this film is about realizing that its not your limitations that define you, but its how you choose to contend with those limitations and unknowns in your life. That has much more to say about your identity. 

Egg: So you’d say the film isn’t about having auto immune diseases, but what you’ve chosen to do in spite of them?

Megan: Yes. It’s almost as if you are boundless. 

(everyone laughs)