Sara Mudallal was 20 years old when she decided to try parkour. She also decided to start wearing a hijab as an expression of her Muslim identity. Over the years, plenty of people told her to stop practicing parkour because of her gender or her faith. But Sara has kept her head up, found success in the world of parkour, and inspired thousands of people to stay true to themselves.
Sara Mudallal was 20 years old when she decided to try parkour. She also decided to start wearing a hijab as an expression of her Muslim identity. Over the years, plenty of people told her to stop practicing parkour because of her gender or her faith. But Sara has kept her head up, found success in the world of parkour, and inspired thousands of people to stay true to themselves.
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Shelby Stanger:
I love hearing about wild ideas that bring people outside in unexpected ways. For Sara Mudallal, video games and anime were a gateway into outdoor athleticism. As a kid who was always jumping on the furniture and swinging on the monkey bars, she was inspired by acrobatic characters in her movies and games. When she was 20 years old, she decided to try parkour. She also decided to start wearing a hijab as an expression of her Muslim identity. Over the years, plenty of people told her to stop practicing parkour because of her gender or her faith. But Sara has kept her head up, found success in the world of parkour, and inspired thousands of people to stay true to themselves. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living an REI Co-Op Studios production.
Parkour is a unique sport that involves using acrobatic and gymnastic movements in urban environments. You might have seen videos of people who scale walls or jump from building to building. These athletes move in ways that somehow seem both effortless and impossible to pull off. But Sara Mudallal proves that with hours of training focus and plenty of perseverance, anyone can learn to practice parkour. Sara Mudallal, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. You just told me what your last name means. Can you tell us again?
Sara Mudallal:
It means spoiled.
Shelby Stanger:
You don't seem very spoiled. You seem just like a grateful, excited, energetic, I just want to soak and squeeze everything out of life kind of a person.
Sara Mudallal:
Oh, it's just you nailed it.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. So for some of us who are completely clueless about parkour, can you just explain what it is?
Sara Mudallal:
Sure. So parkour, the definition is getting from point A to point B as swiftly as possible. Now at this point, when people do parkour outside, sometimes they can go in a circle but the initial definitions just from going from one obstacle to the other in an urban environment with your own flow and personality kind of thing, whether it's over a railing, over a ledge and finally jumping and sticking into, I don't know, in another ledge maybe, but yeah, it's a pretty simple definition, but we can complicate it as hard as we want.
You do the basic moves and then by the time you figure out the essential moves of what parkour is, then you start figuring out your own flow. Because everyone develops their own personality in parkour where, I don't know if you'd compare it to gymnastics. It's like everything needs to be sequential, synchronized, every move needs to be perfect. Where in parkour it's like, oh, he's doing it this way. Oh, I like that. I like the way he does it. That's like his own personality but people can copy that and then make it into their own, which is kind of cool.
Shelby Stanger:
How did you find parkour?
Sara Mudallal:
Funny story, my friend, I don't know. I was first of all into anime a lot, their agility and the way they move, it's just so mesmerizing. And so my friend who we were watching ninja videos out of all things, and I think this was around 2015, he showed me a ninja video and I was like, oh man, yeah, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. And then the next day he's like, yo, there's a parkour gym 10 minutes away from our house. Are you down? I was like, of course I'm down. So we sign up for a class Tempest Free Running, and you just walk in, Shelby, and it's literally a jungle gym for adults. Everything is just jumpable and swingable, and you're an adult and you won't get judged for playing on this platform where you go to a local park, you'll be like, dude, get off. This is for kids. But I go in, I get to take my first class and I never left. I fell in love with it so quick.
Shelby Stanger:
Sara was naturally athletic growing up. She played basketball and when she was 12, her mom enrolled her in karate. Today, Sara is a third degree black belt, and she also trains parkour regularly. After Sara took her first parkour class in 2015, she decided to publish a video of herself on her YouTube channel. Her content was well received. Just two years after posting her first parkour video, she collaborated with the well-known content creator, Nas Daily. They made a video about stereotypes in Sara's case about the assumptions people make about her because of her hijab. The video racked up hundreds of thousands of views from there. Others reached out and Sara's parkour skills were featured on the local news on CNN Sport and on BBC sport. She even made a video with Red Bull. Eventually Sara, ended up on the hit TV show, American Ninja Warrior, where she was the first woman to compete wearing a hijab. I want to talk to you about sports in your culture. Talk to me about it.
Sara Mudallal:
So growing up, I didn't wear the hijab all my life. I wore it actually when I started parkour the same year. But before that, I was just a regular average girl just playing sports and doing my thing. And there's a lot of girls in my community, they just never played sports. They never got into it. They think it's just not, I guess modest or feminine or they just never really was exposed to it maybe how I was in a way. But even when a woman wears a hijab, they're supposed to be "modest" where you don't play sports, you don't move around, you just stay, I guess, I don't want to say timid, but you just don't do it. And for me, just because I wore the hijab doesn't mean my personality is going to change. When I started actually wearing the hijab, I was doing a little bit of tumbling in gymnastics when I was 18.
I did that for two years and then I wore the hijab. And just because I started wearing it doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing it because I like it. And even in karate, growing up, I never wore the hijab and when I started wearing it again, I'm not going to stop training karate because I now wear the hijab. I actually know someone who is a distant family member. She was training karate also, and then she started wearing the hijab and then she stopped doing it. And I talked to her about it and I'm like, why would you stop if you like it? And she goes, well, she's shy. She became reserved, I guess that's the word. She doesn't want to do it. And I guess maybe a little bit of pressure from her family members.
It's difficult because I'm going to tell you, Shelby, even to this day, it's not just women telling other women not to do it. It's men who think they have the authority to tell other women who I don't even know. I still get comments to this day of like, yeah, you should probably stop. Yeah, why are you doing this? Things like that. And it doesn't affect me, but it's just, I kind of laugh at this point because of how ignorant men are and how stupid they look in the comment section when they say that. And it's still a struggle to this day.
Shelby Stanger:
I think there's a lot of confusion around wearing a hijab, and I'd love for you to tell us your experience. And first, for those who don't even know what that means, can you tell us what that means and why you made that decision?
Sara Mudallal:
So being a hijabi, it's part of the religion of Islam that women wear the hijab once they reach puberty. And of course me and many other girls, we all reach puberty around middle school age. So it's still a stage for a girl to still not understand. And this was from my experience, to still not understand me for example, being confident in myself, me not fully understanding about my religion, me also being surrounded by my peers who are also not Muslim. If this was a different situation for me, if I lived in Jordan where the majority of people are Muslim, it could have been easier for me to wear the hijab. But because of that, I waited. And when I graduated high school, I still wasn't wearing it at the time, which was around 2012. And then everyone from high school, I also went to community college.
And so I was like, okay, people still know me. I kind of still don't want to wear it yet because I'm still not ready for it. And then when came the time where I transferred from a community college to university where it's all fresh, all brand new, nobody knows me. And I was telling myself, yeah, I'll just try it out. I think I'm fully confident in who I am and what I want to become and things like that. So when I wore it was also around the same time I started parkour. So the confidence in me is like I know who I will be wearing it for, which is between me and God. I'm not wearing it for my father, I'm not wearing it for my mother. I'm not wearing it for my friend. I'm wearing it for God.
So it's a really tough decision to wear it because it's a commitment. Once you wear it, you essentially should not take it off. But let me be specific on when you're supposed to be wearing it. You don't have to wear it in front of your dad, you don't have to wear it in front of your brother. The only people essentially you're supposed to be wearing it in front of are other men who are not related to you because they're considered marriageable.
Shelby Stanger:
Thank you for sharing that with me. You have this really beautiful, strong sense of self that I admire.
Sara Mudallal:
Thanks.
Shelby Stanger:
I think it's hard for a lot of us to be who we are in this world. And I'm guessing this decision hasn't always been easy. What's something you didn't expect about it that was challenging?
Sara Mudallal:
The biggest part is wardrobe. It's so hard because because there aren't women who do sports in a hijab, there aren't really a specific wardrobe for hijabi women to discover. And if any of you guys ever look through my Instagram, you can see the amount of wardrobe tests and changes I go through throughout the years because...
Shelby Stanger:
Tell us some. I want hear to it.
Sara Mudallal:
I think when I first wore it, I was literally in Target sweats and a long sleeve under a t-shirt and I'm like, dude, it's hot. I have to figure something up. And then I think maybe within a couple months, the Tempest Parkour Gym, they sell merch. They sell parkour clothes, so they sell tanks. And so I bought a tank top and then I went and bought Adidas sweats. And then I was like, all right, so what am I going to wear for long sleeves? Because all the long sleeves just make me feel really hot. And then I started looking into Under Armor with the really thin material. Then I started looking into designs and what looks cute and what looks not like Lululemon or Athleta, they have really breathable fabric that lasts really long. So I started investing into that. And then my wardrobe just progressively started getting better.
Shelby Stanger:
On social media, Sara shares not only her latest training techniques and her progress on new moves, she also shares fun things like her parkour tutorials and her wardrobe. She's built an online community where she can be herself, do what she loves and help others do the same. When we come back, Sara talks about the role of visualization in her practice, her relationship with failure, fear and more. Parkour requires you to look at the world a little differently. Something that athlete, Sara Mudallal is particularly good at. It's all about noticing small features in your environment and quickly being able to gauge distance and height. When I see videos of people doing parkour and flipping over walls, I'm amazed at how fluid and graceful their movements are. Before Sara tries a parkour move out in urban environments, she practices it over and over again in a gym where there are foam pits, pads and other surfaces that are gentler than concrete.
How does one train for parkour?
Sara Mudallal:
So once you master the fundamentals, you could pretty much do anything and then exceed it further. It's kind of also for karate, we all train the fundamentals from the white belt to black belt. And our sensei, he's like, listen, a black belt is a certificate of basics, and once you get your black belt, then you start to learn. When he said that, I was like, oh, okay.
Shelby Stanger:
But the difference between karate and something like parkour is I'm assuming mostly karate's done in a dojo and parkour you do it in a gym but also elsewhere. So tell me a little bit about the difference between what you do in the gym and what you do in the city.
Sara Mudallal:
Sure. So in the gym, you can throw yourself however you want and not get hurt.
Shelby Stanger:
Ideally.
Sara Mudallal:
Ideally, in a safe way. Don't do that whoever's listening.
Shelby Stanger:
In a more controlled environment.
Sara Mudallal:
Yes, I'm just saying that for one. But in a gym I can kind of treat it as a dojo. I'm training in a gym, perfecting my skill, perfecting my art, and understanding my body. I always start off everything at a gym. When I want to flip for the first time, when I really want to make a big jump for the first time when I want to swing in a bar for the first time, everything, me personally, is carefully trained and carefully executed because first of all, it trains my mind that I am capable of doing this. So whenever I start jumping larger and larger gaps, and then let's say I go outside and I see that same distance gap, but outside I could be like, oh yeah, I've done this before. I could easily do it. So my first time I actually ever did a side flip outside. I've trained that in the gym so consistently.
Shelby Stanger:
Are you landing in a mat or are you landing in a foam pit?
Sara Mudallal:
At first it was foam pit, and then once I started standing in the foam pit, I started putting a mat. And then once I started to put the mat, I put a panel mat, which is harder than a mat, and then I started bringing it onto the gymnastics floor, but with a mat. And then once I do that, and then there's a harder floor and I go there. And so I just keep moving up until I'm very comfortable and very confident with my ability to continue the flip and land it and see where I'm going. So my first time ever training outside with a bunch of people that I've met in the gym, because they all train outside regularly. I see this ledge and I see how far it is from the ground, and it's exactly how I've been training to side flip off something in the gym, and it's the same exact setup that I found outside.
And so I was like, okay. So I made a line and that ends with a side flip. And when I landed it first time outside, I was so giddy thinking, wow, all this training, all this where it took me back to concrete outside was one of the biggest accomplishments I've done because it's, first of all, it shows the work that I've been putting in. It's a very, very amazing feeling to experience going through that process in parkour. And essentially that is what parkour is all about. I mean, side flips was one thing, but parkour in general, when you're running and jumping big gaps, you feel like all the work that you've been putting in inside the gym to mentally get to that point is very rewarding.
Shelby Stanger:
So this show is a about nature and what you do is outside, but it's also inside. So when you go outside and you go to a park and I go to a park, I bet they're two different things. When you go to a park, tell me about what you see and then how you decide to pick your line and what goes in that creative process.
Sara Mudallal:
I love that you ask that question because whenever I go to a park, whenever me and my parkour friends, we go to a park, we see it all right, jumping over that, going under that, okay, I could probably go around that, but how am I supposed to go around that? Okay, I got to figure out something here. And it's just a continuous programming in your head. It's just like, okay, there's a lot of things I can do here. Where should I start? Where should I play? This is just full on play. So let's say, you see the monkey bars and you see maybe the bridge platform or you see some railings that probably you can use the monkey bars to swing to, or there's a little tiny circle seats that's random in the park and you just jump to that. And sometimes maybe there's little plastic mushrooms that are sticking out in the park and you're like, okay, maybe I can run through that and then jump to this part of the ledge on the playground structure.
And you could just continuously stir up lines in your head that you can probably do where it's just for someone else to just see kids just swinging or going on a monkey bar and it's just like, okay, so am I seeing this as a little kid or am I being a kid or is it just me as a person who's trained parkour for a very long time? I just have a different mindset of play. One thing that's really even more exciting is when you go to an area where it's not meant for play. Me and my friends, we were driving to just to get acai, and then all of a sudden we drive by a church and I think all of us were just, our eyes just opened up and the amount of play and lines that just came up with our head, it just stirred up so much.
And so as soon as we parked the car and we're like, did you see that? Yeah, I saw that. Did you see that church? Then, so we went the next day, we went back to the church and the amount of stuff that we came up with in an area where it's not even meant for play, it's meant for just aesthetics. We came up with so many things because of how it was built accidentally for parkour, and it's even better when you find the spot like that, they're not a regular jungle gym park because first of all, you get more creative and second you just feel like, yeah, that's my spot. Yeah, I found that spot. Yeah, guys come through, I found this one.
Shelby Stanger:
The infrastructure of our cities, the railings, the retaining walls, even the planters are all opportunities to play. A balcony becomes a place to vault from, benches become stepping stones and bike racks become hurdles. You might see a cool building, but Sara sees an exciting new spot to express yourself, practice new tricks and push her limits.
How does it feel to do parkour? I mean, I'm really curious how it felt at first when you were younger and you tried it for the very first time and you're like, yeah, this. What went through your mind? What made that stick?
Sara Mudallal:
So the idea and thought of, I love the endless possibilities of what the body is capable of doing, mentally too. You can compare it to any sport. When you see a surfer look at that big wave and then just surf down, you're looking at it through a video and I'm like, what is this guy going through surfing this huge 20 foot wave kind of thing? So for parkour, it's like a mental thing too, because when you are jumping from ledge to ledge outside, it's mentally scary because you could easily shin it, you could easily miss. There's a whole bunch of things.
So for me, it's like that's the mindset that I wanted where I wanted to train my body safely, but at the same time strengthen it mentally so that way when I go outside I won't be as scared. But I think the thing that I had to push through the most, which was a little bit frustrating, was creating parkour lines and not to be embarrassed of what you create compared to other people who have been doing it for years and they just look flawless when they do it. That aspect, I think the beginning when people try parkour is the hardest part because when they are in group jams, you just pretty much stand there and you're just looking at everyone, okay, well if I do something, I'm going to be laughed at. But that's the one thing that was kind of hard to push through while starting.
Shelby Stanger:
It is an interesting sport because it involves athleticism and gymnastics and style and personal style, but also there's this element of fear. You're jumping over buildings. When you said you shin it, I'm guessing that means your shin hits a bar or a railing or I mean that's just that expression just makes me, ugh.
Sara Mudallal:
It was, yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
I have a visual reaction. You like to do things that are scary.
Sara Mudallal:
I mean, you can say that. I wouldn't think of it as scary in a way because for me, I would always train, I was a gym rat to begin with, indoors. So if I want to do a big jump, I get all the mats, I get all the mats to keep it there until I mentally know that I'm strong enough to do it that way when I take it out, it's like, okay, not scary. But I mean, I guess if we could compare it to any sport, yeah, it kind of is pretty scary. But I wouldn't say the term of I go looking for something scary to do. What inspires me to do it is like, wow, the body can do that? Well, how do you get there? It's different.
Shelby Stanger:
It's more like you want to see your full potential.
Sara Mudallal:
Yeah, that's it.
Shelby Stanger:
Interesting. We started off this conversation and you said, you kind of like to do things that push your comfort zone, and to me, this sport is full of that.
Sara Mudallal:
It kind of disciplines you mentally as well. It kind of also helps maybe structure your life even better because you continuously challenge the norm kind of thing in life in general. And I don't know, I think it helped me become more of a better person and more, like I said, structured and disciplined.
Shelby Stanger:
A huge amount of Sara's success as an athlete is because of her mindset and her training. It requires discipline to learn progressively harder, parkour movements. She starts with something simple like a small jump and builds up to doing something more complex like a front flip. And then even when she's practiced a move over and over again, she still has to overcome fear and self-doubt to then land it outside.
How do you get pumped to do a line that might be pretty challenging? You have to jump a big gap. You have to do a flip over concrete.
Sara Mudallal:
It's really something that you have to believe in yourself to do. There's a bunch of times where I see jumps that I'm like, you know what? I don't think I can do this jump. I don't think I can do it. And then another part of me is like, oh, you loser, you're stubborn. Come on, don't give up. Just try it. Just try it. And it just keeps nagging me. Yeah, come on, you can do it. You can do it. It's just the competitiveness in me. I can specifically talk about the situation because I was actually discouraged and then I built up my progress to actually make this jump.
Shelby Stanger:
How far is this jump?
Sara Mudallal:
Maybe like eight, 10 feet long. Yeah. I used a ledge to even propel me even further. I saw a guy do the jump and I was like, well, I can't do this jump now. I mean, it looks pretty far, but then I was like, you know what? Let me just take it step by step. So I used a stick as a measuring tool to see how far I can keep pushing it back and making it to eventually make it to the spot where you're supposed to take off from. And so once I got myself to land it and get it recorded, my reaction was just like, I can't believe that I just did that.
I can't believe I went through all of that and then was stubborn about it, competitive about it, and I just completely proved myself wrong and just did it. So in terms of hyping myself, it's never really something that I do all the time. It's just something I progressively do. If let's say I see something and I know I could do this jump, and I know I've done this jump before, but it looks so scary because of how it's positioned. I start envisioning in myself doing it because that's really important mentally. You have to see yourself making it before you make the jump.
Shelby Stanger:
Visualization. That's so hard for some people. How did you learn how to do visualization?
Sara Mudallal:
I learned from my friends. They tell me, listen, you got to see yourself doing it first before you make that jump. If you look at something for the first time and you see yourself doing it, then you can do it. If you look at something for the first time and you immediately do not see yourself doing it, then take a step back, train a little more, and then come back and then see it again. It's a conversation with your mind all the time.
Shelby Stanger:
There's a high element of failure in your sport. You have to fail a lot to succeed, and that's not like hiking. In hiking, you don't really fail at hiking. I mean, sometimes you don't get to the top of the mountain, but when you go to do parkour every day, you're trying something that you don't succeed at. So I'm curious what your relationship with failure is and has it always been this way?
Sara Mudallal:
There's a lot of times where I fail. There's a lot of challenges that I never completed, that I never finished, and sometimes it's pretty frustrating because sometimes you're just very, very close. It's like you want to get it, but you have to know and be strong enough to know when to walk away and not be mad about it because one thing you have to teach yourself, okay, I'm just not strong enough this time, so I'll just have to come back to it. I learned that I can't be mad about it. It's just something that I should not put pressure on myself because I'm really doing this for myself.
Shelby Stanger:
I just think it's kind of cool because you have to encounter failure a lot in your sport, and so I'm sure you're much more comfortable at it now.
Sara Mudallal:
Yeah, failing is part of the routine. It's part of the day. What are we going to fail at today? Let's see.
Shelby Stanger:
What advice do you give people who want to pursue a wild idea?
Sara Mudallal:
Don't take no for an answer, just don't. I could have stopped when my dad said like, yes, stop doing parkour. It's a man's sport. Who knows where I could be sitting right now or seeing comments on social media if I listen to every single person that said, no, I don't know where I would be. And I'm kind of not interested in figuring that out because this is the present. This is where I am right now.
Shelby Stanger:
Sara looks at barriers to success like they're parkour obstacles. She's going to figure out a way to jump over them no matter what. It's how she's become an accomplished parkour athlete, and it's how she's pursuing her goals for the future. And let me tell you, this woman has some big goals. Sara hopes to break into stunt work and open a parkour gym. And because she loves gaming, Sara also wants to open a boba shop for gamers. With her sense of determination, I have faith she'll make her most wild ideas a reality. Sara, thank you so much for talking with me. It was so cool to learn more about parkour. I personally can't even do a cartwheel, so I'm so impressed by someone like you who can do flips and jump walls and do all these crazy moves.
You can see Sara Mudallal's incredible moves on Instagram @SaraMudallal. That's S-A-R-A M-U-D-A-L-L-A-L. You can find her channel on YouTube at Sara Mudallal. Also special thanks to Roman Kote for sending me a great parkour question to ask Sara. Wild Ideas Worth living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, written and edited by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Pierce Nitzburg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber, and our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow this show, rate it and review it wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.