We’re going to be talking about Faith, from Mirror’s Edge, the original game, and some of Catalyst. While it’s not likely to happen, you can expect spoilers from both games during this video. The last post I made about Faith, was more of an exploration on what we can learn from the Runner’s, and how they interact with their society, and how, because of their athletic abilities, the Runner’s have a level of freedom well above that of the average citizen.

This time, we’ll be talking about Faith specifically. We’re going to see how we can adopt some of her skills. Faith is a runner. Runners are best thought of as couriers, who deliver messages or packages that the civilians do not want monitored by the system.

She uses her parkour skills to navigate the rooftops to get to her destination. So with our world slowly becoming closer to this fictional world, let's talk about what you need to do to run from the blues, with style.

Don’t care about Faith? You just want the routine? Well here you go!

Faith is a woman of unknown height and weight.

She’s able to quickly accelerate to a speed of 15 mph and maintain that speed for an indefinite amount of time. She's capable of throwing full grown men around. Some of these guys are in sets of SWAT-like, body armor which means they are likely heavier than average.

Athletic Abilities:

She's able to make jumps that no sane person would consider. In Catalyst, she’s able to handle falls from a little higher, and it seems like she can jump a little further. In general she's' more “suped” up in the second game.

She's able to handle drops of up to what appears to be 20 feet, and land with a roll that dissipates all of the kinetic energy allowing her to remain free from harm.

I personally find her parkour skills the most interesting part of her skill set. And they're’ the most achievable abilities in her skill set.

She’s able to vault over many objects with ease. She can wall run across large gaps . Throughout the game we see her do variations of speed vaults, variations of lazy vaults, I believe we can even see her do a monkey vault. Other times she just straight up jumps over an obstacle like a track runner clearing a hurdle. She's able to Tic Tac from wall to wall to get to a ledge that's slightly above her reach.

We also see that she is a master of the parkour roll which allows humans to take Falls that would normally injure them.

Combat Training:

We don't have a lot of information about Faith's combat training. From what I can see faith is in her mid twenties. Per the comics, we see she started training as a teenager.

We don't know what forms she started training. But It’s very clear to me that she has legitimate combat training. She demonstrates moves that are close to Krav Maga, or that give hints of Judo and Taekwondo .

Cardio:

Faith’s cardio is her standout trait. She is a runner of course. Her entire job revolves around delivering these messages, by running all day everyday. She is capable of accelerating up to 15 miles per hour.

15 mph may not sound very fast if you're only used to riding in cars. There's also some videos of people sprinting at 20 mph or 22 mph, and that makes 15 miles an hour look like nothing. but when put in the context of sprinting, not on a treadmill but outside and imperfect conditions on terrain that is not level and while preparing to do some parkour, I think we can start to see how impressive that speed is. I would even say that faith can probably run faster than 15 mph, but 15 mph is her perfect speed and parkour balance.

Diet:

We have no information on what Faith eats. All we can really say looking at her build and looking at her cardio level is that she probably doesn't eat more calories than she burns. I would suggest that, with her being so physically active with her engaging in so many intense activities like parkour or martial arts, she probably eats more than the average person in real life, and therefore her build is telling us that she eats at maintenance it just is likely more to facilitate her active lifestyle. She probably eats 2,600 calories a day.

I would also say that she has to eat somewhat healthy just so her body does not break down from all of the physical activities that she's doing. In my experience, running very quickly revealed how poor my diet was. I’d specifically try to eat better, just so I could feel better when running.

All types of running, sprinting short distances, or jogging long distances, put a lot of pressure on your joints. Faith would be eating food that fuels her body, and repairs the damage done by those runs. She should eat a good amount of protein. Looking at her size that would be about, 120g- 130g of protein a day. She'd need to eat foods with vitamins and such to prevent joint injuries, and things like shin splints. That is just my projection of what one would eat to maintain their body. This is a fictional world where she might eat their version of McDonald's all the time. It just depends.

Physique:

To be slightly critical, as always I would prefer for women in fiction to have a little bit more muscle, Closer to Sha'carri Richardson or Lorena’s level, especially when you factor in the Parkour Faith does.

Psychology & Intellect

Faith's mental state and her psychology is hard to talk about. That’s what happens when EA kills a game series. There’s not much info available for a character analysis. We know Faith is a rebel. We can see from her choice of work. We can see it from her interactions with the people around her that she is distrusting of authority figures, of systems of power. And rightly so, her experience with these systems of power and authority led to the deaths of her parents, and the framing of her sister. They're always negative experiences, of course she would feel this way about this oppressive dystopian Society.

Faith is in a resilient individual. In the second game she's in prison before she's released and she jumps right back into her activities and doesn't miss a beat. From what we can see with her interactions with the prison guard even her time in prison did not weaken or break her spirit.

Realism:

Faith is basically a real person. Almost everything she does can and has been done by real people. The only unrealistic things about Faith’s physical abilities is how much distance she can get from a horizontal wall run, and how she’s able to beat up crowds of people, and her consistent gun disarms. Wall running is a difficult skill in real life, and in almost every case, if you’re fighting more than one person you’re going to lose. Gun disarms in general are always risky business.

Faith’s top speed maxes out at 15 miles an hour. That’s a 4 minute mile which is very fast, yes. But Faith isn’t seen maintaining that speed for long. To put things into perspective, her 100 yard dash time would be about 13 seconds. For the amount of time she’s running, before she has to turn, fight, or deal with an obstacle, her speed is realistic.

Those drops she takes? Also realistic. There’s a lot of debate on what’s the highest fall a high level Traceur can handle, without injury, when they roll out of it. I buy into the idea that a high level traceur, with perfect rolling, with extremely strong legs, could handle a drop of up to 30 feet. We can look at people like people like Dominic Di Tommaso & Dominik Sky. Either way, I don’t believe that Faith takes any falls from that height in the game. If she does, she lands on a cushioned mat.

I believe that Faith's physique is almost entirely realistic. I would prefer to see her with a little bit more muscle mass, but I still know women who are that lean who are Runners who are also capable of doing some Pull-Ups which would likely be able to translate into doing the level of Parkour that Faith engages in. I personally just think women should have a little bit of muscle if they're active. It looks realistic, it looks cool. I like it.

Routine:

Okay so we talked about Faith. We talked about how awesome she is. Now what can you do to become just as awesome?

First, go see how fast you are! Go run a 100 yard dash, because it's probably more applicable than a 40 yard dash. Find your miles per hour by using this converter. You can also try to figure out what your max speed is for a longer distance, maybe the 400m Dash. That's up to you, as long as we're dealing with short distances it's really all just up to your personality

Once you figure out what your max speed is, you have a really solid place to work from.

Once you figure out what your max speed is, write it down and you can start sprint training. Now, I need to be clear. I have almost no experience with sprinting. Sprinting is a high impact activity that can hurt you if you’re not ready for it. So make sure you do your research. Maybe look into getting a Sprinting coach.

Another thing we can do is look at a much longer distance- The 5k. I feel like an argument could be made that Faith routinely sprints, to run from “blues” and also covers up to 5 kilometers, for her deliveries. While this can still be rough on your joints, this will be a little easier on your body than sprinting. So you should also look into tackling this distance as well.

Faith is, of course, more than just her cardio. She has martial arts skills. I would strongly suggest taking up some kind of martial art.

I would suggest looking into Krav Maga. Krav Maga can be a very mcdojo style of training, so be mindful of where you're going. Give a gym a shot. If you get the impression that this is not practical, maybe take a step back, find another place to train or just go ahead and join a kickboxing or Judo or MMA gym.

If you're able to find a solid Krav Maga place then you will learn weapon disarms, you will get pressure test training, and you will get a good explanation of the mindset you need to have if you are in a fight for your life. This will pair very well with your running. A lot of the advice is to run away if you are able. If you've been hitting those 400 m sprints you can take off like the Flash.

For strength training, Faith is not a very large woman, she doesn't have a ton of muscle mass. Strength training would still greatly benefit all aspects of this routine but it is not the emphasis.

You’ll only need a few exercises to enhance your parkour, martial arts and running.

You’ll want to cover all your vertical and horizontal pushing and pulling. Pull-ups or Lat pulldowns have very obvious benefits for parkour. You'd want to do a horizontal pull like a Row as well. You would also want to do some type of horizontal push like a push-up or bench press just to balance things out.

You're going to want to do some type of squat. In my opinion, the Bulgarian Split Squat is the winner here.

You're also going to want to do some hamstring curls if possible. Hamstring isolation, is going to help your acceleration.

Strong glutes are very important to avoiding knee pain and keeping your knees healthy. so you wont want to neglect them. Even though it’s not an isolation exercise, Romanian Deadlifts will give you a lot of bang for your buck, by hitting the hamstrings and glutes.

A Faith style workout would involve a very simple two times a week maybe three times a week full body session.

To finish it out I would strongly suggest some level of Parkour. Faith is more along the pure parkour side of things. She doesn't engage in very much free running. We can think of free running as the fancy flips that look cool, but deep down we know slow us down, or aren’t very efficient.

You can very easily start with parkour, learn a few simple vaults that focus on speed and clearing obstacles. Try to master that shoulder roll and get a vertical wall run, and you’ll be set. – Ronnie Street Stunts has excellent youtube videos that can help you get started with parkour.

Here’s the full strength training program. It revolves around leg work a decent amount of leg work. I give a proposed schedule for running as well, but that’s about all I can do for sprint training. I’d strongly recommend you look for a coach if you want to really dive into the running side of things.

Improve your Endurance, Learn Parkour: Train like Faith