Meet Allen Roberts, a Vancouver based builderer, scholar, and all around hard-man who's name is awfully similar to Frenchman Alain Robert's.

So Allen Roberts eh?

Yeah I like to think of myself as the “thinking man’s Alain”.

Allen vs. Alain in a walk-off [Zoolander style]?

Oh I’d win for sure. Have you seen that guy? Oh wait…I guess it depends on whether it’s European fashion, or North American fashion. If it takes place at the FCUK headquarters then I’m screwed, but if it takes place at Mark’s Work Wearhouse, then I’d win for sure.

Allen and Alain at a bar. Who’s the wingman?

Oh I'm the wingman for sure. Unless it’s a British bar, then he’s the wingman.

Since Alain Robert officially owns the Spiderman persona, which superhero do you personify?

I don’t think I personify any superhero. But since we are talking about superheroes, here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately: the parkour community has yet to embrace DareDevil as their indelible mascot. I mean, it’s completely obvious. Here’s a guy who receives his power solely off his perception of his spatial environment. He doesn’t feel fear because A) he’s a badass acrobat, but also because B) he doesn’t sense the gigantic drop beneath him. He can’t see things to be afraid of, so that empowers him to be the “the man without fear”.

Is fear the only thing holding us back from performing such DareDevil-esque feats?

Absolutely, but it's fear of so many different things. You’ve got fear of physical pain, either of getting hurt or the pain of training, you’ve got the emotional fear of failure, social fears, psychological fears, and so on and so forth. Instead of one monstrous fear, it’s a whole bunch of little fears that you can overcome. There’s a great book out there called “The Rock Warrior’s Way: Mental Training for Climbers” by Arno Ilgner, which talks all about this.

Buildering has been really good for me in this regard, especially the social fear of climbing. When you’ve been rock-climbing for awhile you get used to obeying these certain modes of how you should climb, or how you should think about climbing. Whereas with buildering, you are all of a sudden thrown into this arena where nobody cares at all about what you are doing, or how you are doing it. So now you are completely free to develop your own set of rules, and to do it however you feel…unless cops yell at you.

Have you ever been arrested?

Yeah, once in Chamonix. I was living down there with some climbing friends: Adam and Alex. After many drinks, we all decided to go out and do some buildering. We ended up climbing this enormous boom crane, but unfortunately some firemen saw us. They were very friendly firemen, but insisted on detaining us while they called the police. The police weren’t nearly as happy to have been woken up at 3am, so they yelled at us for awhile, threw us into their van, drove a good 20 minutes out of town and made us walk back in the cold. We didn’t get back until around 5am, all sober and disappointed – but pleased to not have been beaten as we had heard rumours that the French police like to use their batons on American tourists.

Do you prefer buildering when drunk?

No. Usually I builder alone or with one other like minded individuals. But occasionally I’ll head out in a large drunken group which makes for more spotters. You can’t have too many spotters, as the more drunk your spotters are, the more you need.

Actually, buildering has made me change my drinking habits from being a marathon drinker to a binge drinker. I pretty much have to drink enough to hit the floor, or else I’ll get the urge to go out buildering. It also helps to have a sober girlfriend who has either a very strong emotional and psychological influence on you, or is very strong physically.

Allen on a deadly traverse, Vancouver

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in the flatlands of Akron Ohio, home of the Goodyear and Firestone factories -- essentially an industrial wasteland. I started climbing when I was around 12, but the only things to climb in Akron are boulders about 30 ft high, so I soon found myself looking for taller things to climb -- things like the nearby industrial buildings.

Probably the highlight of my Akron buildering career was climbing the historic theatre. The building straddles the Ohio Erie Canal, which runs through Akron, and the corner that I climbed was about 70ft high.

I wanted to climb it before I turned 18, for legal reasons, so I ended up climbing it in the middle of winter since my birthday was coming up in a month. The corner was an arête, with little triangular gaps where the bricks met at about a 120° angle. The gaps all looked uniform from the ground, but I as discovered when I got about 20ft up, some of the mortar had filled the gaps completely over. So what I thought would be a straightforward climb ended up being about a 5.9, and it was quite cold on the fingers. My hands went numb after about 40ft, but by then I figured it was quicker to go up than to go down. And of course to make things worse, at the top of the climb are these big earthenware glazed cornice things, which were loosely set, so if you pull on them a certain way they’ll rip right off the building. So I spent another 5 or 10 minutes at the top of the climb banging on these things to see if they’d take my weight. The whole experience was quite horrifying.

When I finally topped out, I ran over to the other side of the building where there was a 50ft wall, with a 10ft gap to a barbed-wire fence, and then another 10ft drop down into the canal. I tied a single strand section of old climbing rope to a utility line and zipped down the wall. When I got close to the bottom, I took a good hard kick off the wall, bounced off of the fence once, and rappelled right off the end of the rope into the canal. I swam through the canal, under the building, and ran back to the car.

I almost froze to death.

Do you think Alain still climbs for fun, or is it only for commercial and political reasons these days?

Oh I’m sure he’s out there having a blast, just like you or me. He just happens to make a bit of money at it. As far as his climbing as a form of political protest, the problem is that people seldom remember what it is a protest of. The message has form but no content. The form is that he’s putting himself at grave bodily risk for some noble cause. He is essentially threatening the onlooker with a situation where he might fall and traumatize them for life, and in that situation he tries to manipulate the onlooker in the way they feel about something. But that’s where the message fails to stick -- people might remember his climb a year down the road, but they won’t remember what he was protesting.

And of course the message is even less meaningful to those of us who do climb. We know that Alain is just out there for a good time. We aren’t as affected by his apparent life-risking situations, because we all know that he is solid. Alain knows he’s solid. A soloist knows he’s solid, he knows he’s not going to end up like a strawberry splatter on the pavement.

Allen's contest winning ascent from
the 2007 UBC Buildering Contest.

But average citizens have that exact image running through their mind.

Definitely. Buildering can be quite disturbing for “the normals”. That’s why I climb at night, or in such a way as to not be visible to people. I’ve gotten less concerned about this as time goes on, but for awhile I was really concerned about not scaring people. I think that is why buildering remains a solitary pursuit, since most practitioners are intent of minimizing its “spectacular” element.

And look at parkour, which is even more spectacular. The interesting thing with parkour is that it has an element of being watched. It’s almost necessary, since if you are going to add flair to something, say doing a flip instead of a straight jump, you want somebody to see that.

I see parkour as the lovechild of buildering and break-dancing. It’s playing in an urban environment, with the showmanship of break-dancing. That’s why parkour is practiced in groups. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but it’s not for me.

What shoes do you wear for buildering?

Chuck Taylor All stars. The toe cap works well for jamming, the high ankles give you some support, they are sensitive, and the rubber works better on glass and steel than climbing rubber. The only downside it that they don’t have much cushioning, so don’t fall.

If you were a hot dog and you were starving, would you eat yourself?

That reminds me of a short story by Steven King. It’s about a surgeon who gets stranded on a desert island with nothing but a bundle of coke and his tools. He anesthetizes himself and slowly eats himself.

Uhmm...I guess that's an answer. Any advice for the masses of kids out there trying to make a name for themselves in the world of buildering?

Stick to parkour.