Here you will learn everything you need to know about the screaming idiots from the heart of the Ruhr area.
By the way, the heart of the Ruhr area is Essen, but that's obvious to everyone anyway.
Let's start at the beginning
or what...
HOW DID THE NAME “FREERUNNING SLIPPERS” COME ABOUT?
It's simple: Put a few underage idiots in a Bochum indoor swimming pool and let them fly off the 5-meter slide. The result is a series of belly and back splashes. The resulting laughter is fantastic and the chorus of "You idiot!" shouts from the onlookers.
The situation quickly escalates the first time the scrotum becomes the primary contact point between the water and the idiot, nerves are frayed, and the onlookers can only utter "You shitty idiot!" A congenital linguistic incompetence among some of the participants quickly leads them to combine the word "shit" with the word "idiot." The result: "You idiot!" An expression that delighted all the splashing idiots and quickly became the favorite word of the day.
After Jan nearly broke his neck during an elegant backflip scorpion fail on the swing, the WhatsApp group was quickly renamed from "Freerunning" to "Freerunning Schlappen." An Instagram channel with the same name was also quickly created... on January 10, 2016, to be precise.
FIRST VIDEO, FIRST SLIPPER TOUR & FIRST STUNTS
Over time, the friendship strengthened, the training sessions became more intense, and the desire to nail some serious jumps and upload clips of them online grew. So, we diligently collected clips for our first major YouTube video. On June 18, 2017, the time had finally come: our first video project, "Welcome to Freerunning Schlappen," was uploaded to YouTube. A new video needed to be worked on as quickly as possible. A new video idea was quickly developed: "Let's drive through Europe in a car for two weeks and film everything. And let's call the whole thing 'Schlappentour' or something."
So we went on tour through Germany and the Czech Republic, full of enthusiasm and excitement, trained at well-known parkour spots for the first time, experienced the thrill of road tripping and had a firecracker between our cheeks for the first time.
"Firecracker in the buttocks" is a fantastic keyword... We quickly realized that we not only have a passion for parkour/freerunning, but also a strong passion for stunting – in the truest sense of the word. So, in the following videos, we sought and partly found a healthy mix of athletic finesse and rough-and-tumble stunting. We quickly realized that we wanted more than just a healthy mix.
So, plans for the next big video project were forged and put into action... children's fireworks became ball bombs, and funny ideas evolved into painful undertakings. The whole thing went online just in time for Christmas 2018 under the name "IT'S A BOOM TING - Stunt Video 1." A few months later, the thing was shot straight away – the first major success.
The standard for stunts of all kinds was raised considerably, jumps and flips improved, and our wanderlust was maximized. So we regularly toured European cities with the intention of pushing the limits in every respect, capturing them on video, and posting them on all social media platforms. Every now and then, a new YouTube video would appear, and most of the clips would end up on Instagram. The spirit of making a splash online had been awakened.
SLIPPER TOUR DOCUMENTATION & START OF THE SANDHAUFEN HUNT
Suddenly, it was summer 2019, and for the third year in a row, it was time for a new adventure: Schlappentour. So we set off in our beloved blue VW T4 Multivan and visited Europe's most iconic spots – with the goal of filming a world-class parkour/stunt video and a 90-minute documentary. Stunts and jumps (some of which weren't even considered stunts) were taken to a whole new level. Dwayne jumped out of the car at 50 km/h, Jan flipped the Manpower Gap – the most venerable roof gap in the world, Jaspek, Etienne, and our honorary brother Max, aka "the Toad Fucker," impressed with their subtle movements, pure hype, and finesse for camera and odds. After 16 days of touring, it was time to sort through 1 TB of footage, edit the video, and put together a 1.5-hour documentary. At this point a big sorry to our beloved toad-fucker Max... 50% of the footage showed naked, disgustingly unhygienic, pathologically unfunny and grossly antisocial rabble from Essen, who couldn't have been prouder, happier and more satisfied with this 50% of footage.
The documentation was in progress, the 2019 Schlappentour video was a complete success, and our motivation to start further major video projects was at its peak. It was a good thing that we came across a few sand piles at exactly this time. We quickly realized that we had to step this up. We hunted down piles of all kinds, visited sand pits, broke into construction sites, and threw three pairs of socks into our backpacks until we said, “Let’s make a video in which we determine the maximum drop and permanently destroy our knees.” The resulting video was called “HUNTING DROPS” and was the beginning of a hopefully never-ending bliss. Sand pile jumps and high drops became an integral part of the Schlappen DNA—a fantastic mix of stunts and parkour, fun and pain, freedom and police parades. The maximum had not yet been determined, but the world record had already been set. On June 8, 2023, Ette Paff flew from 13.5m towards the heaped sand on an idyllic construction site in the beautiful city center of Essen.
The motto is clear: find your limits!
So we had to act quickly and turn our new skill, coupled with the ever-growing interest in incredibly stupid ideas, into a video idea. Filming for "STUNT VIDEO 2" began with the clear intention of making the first video of its kind completely obscure. Thus, shopping cart jumps into bushes transformed into a shopping cart pyramid consisting of three levels (three carts at the bottom, two in the middle, and one at the top). Simple somersaults from the rolling, cuboid metal grid were transformed into doubles. Ball bombs were no longer launched close to the body with appropriate protective devices, but were combined countless times with firecrackers of all powers, and brought even closer to the body without any protection.
The video was quickly completed and uploaded to our YouTube channel – without injury and, to date, without a strike – a testament to the failure.
And then the misery really took its course – holy shit!
On August 14, 2020, late Friday evening, after work, we headed 650km south to the Free State of Bavaria for a weekend, or something? The reason was an agreed-upon video shoot with our esteemed honorary brother Rainhard Riede, aka Riede94. Events unfolded rapidly... She had to be taken to the hospital in Kempten, 50km away – the reason: blindness due to a steel splinter in her eye. After Dwayne and Jan had dropped the beast off at the emergency room, they drove back to the waterfalls at full speed. The motto was clear: slack off wherever possible and push boundaries in every area – prevent a polarization of the highest order.
The reason: Riede94 already had a huge audience on YouTube.
With insane motivation, they raced to the Allgäu's natural wonder, accompanied by musical masterpieces like "All My Friends Are Dead," "The Hunter," and "If You Gonna Be Dumb, You Gotta Be Tough." These musical masterpieces could also be called "the anthems of festive self-destruction" – wonderful! And so the spectacle began. A series of rash jumps with enormous risk of injury, cheesy gags, and firework stunts in the deepest, most fire-prone forest were a fantastic start to the video shoot. When Jan then let himself be persuaded to do the most unnecessary and brainless backflip in the middle of a sloping forest, kilometers away from the world's buttocks, the fun really began, and his lateral ligaments were torn. After hours of towing, the team returned to the waterfalls, not heading for Etienne, i.e. the hospital, but up onto a 20m cliff to douse the rags with methylated spirits, light matches, set the body ablaze, and learn how to sail through the air... All-in for a great clip, burns on their own tail, and a full-throttle shitstorm from tourists, nature lovers, and 50% of Riede94 fans - in summary, an even bigger success than Jan's massive diveroll fail in the Munich Olympic Village at the end of August 2021 - the result: Pipkin 2 dislocation fracture (dislocated and shattered femoral head).
But what does that have to do with the impending misery, you might ask… so far everything has been going perfectly.
This awesome weekend, which (seriously) couldn't have gone better in the long run, was the starting signal for the weekly videos on our YouTube channel that continue to this day.
Since the release of the video “Schlappentour 2020” on September 6, 2020, week after week, every Sunday at 8 p.m., it has been: “Moin oder watt and a warm welcome to the new video!”
When the video of our trip to the Buchenegger Waterfalls finally saw the light of day on Riede94, more and more people discovered our channel and started watching the weekly videos, commenting on them, and recommending them – HOW DID YOU KNOW!
We quickly realized that this is exactly what we wanted to do - to make people giggle on a regular basis, to inspire them to light up, to give them big back slaps in piles of sand and to give the seriousness of life the ring finger.
THREE YEARS LATER - FULL-TIME IDIOT?
And now we're sitting here, three years later, still together... as Freerunning Schlappen... and as Freerunning Schlappen GmbH... in an office... decorated with a silver YouTube play button... decorated with posters and pictures of countless epic experiences... with scars all over our bodies... scars that tell the craziest stories, or something.
Since the trip to the Buchenegger Waterfalls, life has devolved into pure madness. These days, our everyday professional activities include setting fire to astral and less astral bodies, sticking firecrackers into the depths of brown cracks, collecting concussions, celebrating swimsuit marches through English capitals, enjoying 25-meter free flight phases, knocking over complete idiots in portable toilets, and much more.
Old Salmon, Old Bear and Old Bearlack!
It sounds like we're ringing in the end of freerunning... but this is absolutely top-notch Spökes. You can top it off with whipped cream. The end is nowhere in sight. The end will be in sight when visibility is gone 4x2. We love it more than ever, pushing ourselves into absolute full send week after week.
Shortly before writing this text, we were still standing in front of each other, armed with knockout spray, aka pepper spray, one meter apart. It made a lot of noise in Alten See. But it had to make a lot of noise!
In this sense:
Anyone who has read this far has a real head on – and that is the coolest thing in the world!
Cheers to being on the helmet!
Thanks to everyone who supports us in this madness.
Feel kissed and caressed. On the nut and wherever else.
Schlapp up your life!
And thus: