For this week’s Athlete Spotlight we are thrilled to bring you an interview with Czech traceur Mikeš! (you might know his as Mikesh). Mikeš has been on the scene for some time, and although his following has been steadily growing, he came to prominence in 2019 was he was awarded as breakout athlete in Storror Awards. His authentic uniqueness, his smooth style, and his focus on spins has always inspired us, and we were stoked to have the chance to interview him for the site!
Mikes was extremely generous with his time and gave some really unique insight into his mindset and approach, his projects, and more. This interview is full of content and videos, but don’t get sidetracked the personal insights that Mikeš offers are killer so zero in on those.
Last of all, it’s worth saying that we reached out to Mikeš because he has a unique style and we had a desire to bring more attention to his movement, his passion, and his projects, But we have left this interview with a desire to help put Czech Parkour on the map. We hope you join in that cause by following him on Instagram, subscribing on YouTube, and keeping your ears open for the content that he and the core Czech Parkour scene has coming down the pipe.
Without further ado, let’s get to the interview.
What is your name, age, and where are you from?
Well my name is actually not Mikesh but Mikeš. The “š” sign stands for “sh” in our language, and as Instagram doesn’t allow you to use the “š” sign in your account name, I had to adapt the spelling to Mikesh. I’m 24 years old and I come from Prague – capital of the Czech Republic.
How did you get involved with Parkour & Freerunning, how old were you when you started, and how long have you been training?
I started parkour 11 years ago when I first watched one video of David Belle. I don’t remember the name of the video as I had it in my crappy phone back then, but I remember that the soundtrack was “Lose Yourself” by Eminem. Totally fell in love with what I saw and just started to imitate in on my own. I was actually training only on my own for first four years cause I was too shy to join the Prague’s community. Dumb right?
{Parkour.com edit: it was probably the “On Advance Toujours” video. Click here to watch}
What do you enjoy most about your movement/training? How often do you train?
What I enjoy about my training the most is 50 % the movement but another 50 % is the community. Love my friends and love spending time with them even when we’re not training. I train almost every day during the summer, however winters here suck so it’s pretty hard to keep training during this season. Also I don’t enjoy training inside so I find winters pretty depressing training-wise. What’s positive on winters though is that I got more time for editing and releasing our projects.
What is your favorite PKFR move or technique, and why do you like it so much?
I have phases. My favourite moves change often but overall I can say that most of my favourite moves include spinning. I love 360 pres, 360 strides, reverse pres… and when it comes to vault pres, I just love all of them. Yeah… I’m a vault pre guy when I think about it. Kong pres, dash pres, lazy pres… yum!
What is your favorite food, drink, or meal?
Sweets.
What are your favorite shows, movies, and music?
I’m not really into shows or movies, but I’m a huge music lover. As a drummer I love rhythmical heavy music such as deathcore, djent or progressive metalcore.
Are you working on any projects at this time? If so, what?
Happy you asked! As a man of projects, I’m more than happy to tell you what you can look forward to! There are four projects that I’m working on or I’m part of at the moment. Each is a #saveyourclips project and each is connected with my team/project called Stünts (it’s pronounced stÜnts).
The most recent project is a video that we made this summer when we flew to Belgium to meet our fav guys from a team called Street Sharks. One of my craziest weeks in my life captured on some funny special cameras & edited half by me and half by Ravi and Gaspard from Streetsharks. If you know how these guys edit, you know that this one’s gonna be a banger.
Second is another collab – Stünts x Pasta Moves. Few of my friends from this Italian team came over to Prague this summer, we had a sick time together here and then we went with them to Italy to have a sick time there too. Expect some banger clips from Prague, Milan and Turin in this project!
Another two projects are pure Czech thing, which is very important to me and to our small Czech community. The purpose of these two projects is to show off our small but strong community, our spots and just the uniqueness of Czech parkour.
First is „Vandrs 2“. Second part of a project that’s about exploring towns all around our country, searching for spots and just jumping on whatever we find. First Vandrs was a series of 14 episodes, Vandrs 2 is gonna be different. 23 people in six cars cruising around 20 towns in just one week. Not gonna leak more info, only that I’m pretty excited about this one.
And the second Czech project is still in the making. Always wanted to do a big Prague video with all the people I train with here. Got a sick camera and a big list of jumps. Nothing more needs to be said.
How is Parkour seen in your country?
That’s one of the toughest things we fight with here in Czech. It’s not about parkour not being allowed here or police problems etc but… Parkour between muggles here is considered as a pretty lame, awkward thing to do. It has one reason – Czech pakour youtubers. We have many youtubers here that popularize parkour for muggles. That would have been a nice thing to do unless you do it the way they do it. They do it the viral way, the awkward way, the cringe content way, the “I only care about money” way. And unfortunately it works well for them here. One of them is the 5th most subscribed youtuber in our country and he makes millions. This fact makes our true Czech parkour culture totally unseen and hidden behind their popularity. When people see us training, they only see the cringe content the youtubers create. I actually have friends that don’t admit they do parkour when someone asks them about their hobbies, cause they feel ashamed of it. It’s very hard to make any change in this but fortunately these youtubers are known only in our country and even though they have hundreds of thousands of subscribers no one from the worlds community knows about them. And that’s where I come, trying hard to become the right person to represent our country in the world.
What advice do you have for anyone starting on the PKFR journey?
You came to an interesting stage of parkour evolution with many ways, many techniques and many people to take inspiration from. Choose what fits you the best and enjoy the ride. But be aware of the dark side, always look after our culture and build it the way you want the future parkour to be.
What has been the biggest setback to your career, and what has been the biggest highlight?
I consider myself as a very careful person when it comes to parkour. My progression since the beginning has been very slow but very persistent. I never commit to challenges when I’m not at least 90% sure that I’m capable of doing it. Because of that it took me quite long to get on a current level but at the same time it prevented me from setbacks.
And my biggest higlight? Arguably the biggest appreciation I could ever get, which was being announced as a breakout on the very first Storror awards in 2019. This was a highlight I didn’t even wish for and I’ll never forget the day when THE STORROR officially and publicly appreciated what I do.
What advice do you have for people wanting to become as adept and successful as you?
If you want to be successful in parkour, do TikTok content. Sad right? And if you wanna be successful and respected by parkour community, delete your TikTok and create projets that will help our culture to grow. These projects don‘t have to be next RCA, just bring your ideas alive and the community will appreciate it. Or at least I will!
What are your favorite Instagram/social media accounts and YouTube Channels?
I love creating projets as well as watching them. So I enjoy watching teams and people who are taking it the same way I do. My favorite channels on YouTube are The Beans, Kipa, Gefam, Denester, Pohybový Bordel (an underrated Czech channel worth checking out), Fifthunit and the channel I come back to most often is Brewman. On Instagram, I follow parkour community and recently fell for community of freestyle skiers.
How close do you think you are to reaching your full athletic potential? Do you have any weaknesses that you are working on improving?
I never really had goals to reach and I still don’t actually. I take the current level of my abilities as the 100 % and every other extra ability is just another higher 100 %. I hope it makes sense haha. Basically I feel that I’m in my fullest athletic potential at the moment, but wether it‘s the highest 100 % or not, is another question. Does it make sense?
And my weaknesses? Basically everything that requires having my arms above my head. The fact that you haven’t seen me doing lots of lashes and carts etc. has it’s reason. I have genetically unstable shoulders and they pop out pretty easily when hanging or swinging with my arms above my head. It’s not that I absolutely cannot do any of this, I just have to be very careful, I never really push myself into big stuff, therefore I never really film me trying them.
Over the last year and a half how did you cope with the shutdowns and the changes brough on by COVID-19?
It didn’t really effect my daily training but it made me not wanna travel, which was a hard decision cause traveling is a big part of parkour to me. Anyway I tried to take the best advantage out of it and started exploring my own country that I realised I barely knew before. Also that’s how an idea of Vandrs was born.
Outside of Parkour/Freerunning, what are your favorite hobbies? How do you spend your time when you aren’t training?
I study sports for disabled people, I like to spend time with my girlfriend, I play music instruments, I listen to music a lot and when I’m not training I try to come up with future projects.
Where do you want to go from here? What are your goals and what more do you want to accomplish?
As I said, I don’t really have any goals and I don’t think about the future that much. Maybe if there’s one goal I kinda try to accomplish with my current effort, it’s to put Czech parkour on the map.
How can people be more connected with you and follow your work and career?
I present all of my work on my Instagram account @mikesh.pk and I upload most of my projects to our team YouTube channel Stünts.
Please do yourself a favor and go follow Mikes on his Instagram and subscribe to his YouTube channel. We have been following him for years and every single thing he posts is a joy to watch. Also stay tuned for those projects he talked about. We’ll be writing about those as they get published late this yer and next.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikesh.pk
