Part jumping, part gymnastics in an urban playground

What is parkour? It's athletes climbing and leaping from structures in a fluid motion like Spiderman. KC Armstrong/SI

By L. Jon Wertheim, SI.com

Cloud Gardens, a small park in the core of Toronto's downtown, is one of those urban sanctuaries to which Cubicle Nation comes to escape fluorescent lighting and luxuriate in the fresh air. On an unseasonably hot fall afternoon, the bankers eating their panini lunches and the lawyers on their smoke breaks in the park got a surprise. Dan Iaboni, a wiry 25-year-old with an ecstatic-go-lucky disposition, turned Cloud Gardens into his personal jungle gym.

With a series of fluid and well-considered movements, Iaboni vaulted from one ledge to another, landing easily, his bent knees serving as shock absorbers. He catapulted himself over a cantilevered beam, dug his feet into a metal restraining wall and then hurtled himself onto a concrete platform 15 or so feet below.

Stopping only to wipe flecks of sweat from his brow with his T-shirt and re-tie his running shoes, he gripped the underside of a bridge above a small waterfall and pulled himself across.

In addition to drawing the inevitable comparisons to Spiderman, Iaboni drew plenty of stares. But, perhaps because he wasn't making any noise, leaving any skid marks, or interrupting anyone's peace, the stares were of the amused, not the angry, variety. "What's that guy doing?" a perplexed smoker asked aloud. "Some kind of athletics?"

Yes and no. Iaboni was practicing parkour, an activity that's almost as hard to define skillfully as it is to do skillfully. An alloy of sport, avant-garde art, martial-arts style discipline and philosophy, parkour entails moving through your environment using your body and the surroundings to propel yourself. Deriving its name from a corruption of the French word parcours (meaning path), parkour is predicated on confronting obstacles and negotiating them creatively, rather them avoiding them.

"It's moving quickly and efficiently with a purpose," says Iaboni, the de facto leader of Toronto's parkour scene, which with 400 members, is the largest in North America. "There's a lot of technique but it's also a form of self-expression. One guy could jump from rooftop to rooftop. Another guy could scale a tree. And they would both be doing parkour."

With the Internet helping to foment the revolution, parkour has -- quickly and efficiently -- vaulted, careened and commando-rolled into the mainstream. The province of a few French contortionists just a couple of years ago, parkour is suddenly everywhere. It was featured in the spellbinding construction site chase scene of last summer's Bond blockbuster Casino Royale. Even Frosti from this season's Survivor lists his occupation as "parkour athlete."

By design, parkour has no governing body, no formal leaders, no marketing department -- and thus no hard, fast participation figures. But for evidence of its swelling popularity, just spark up google or go to YouTube and check out the volume of entries, like here and here. Better still, venture to any urban warehouse district or suburban park and odds are good that a practitioner will soon come bounding past.

Parkour enthusiasts are called traceurs, as they trace the path of the sport's founders. (A female is called traceuse, though women are vastly outnumbered by men.) Most traceurs tend to be free spirits in their 20s, hailing from all over the globe. Virtually every city in the U.S. now has a thriving parkour scene but it's even more popular in Europe. Poland and Latvia, for instance, are two hotbeds. Turns out, Communist-era architecture -- all that concrete and steel -- makes for ideal training facilities.

Most traceurs are like Chris Levesque, 26, a San Francisco banker by day and parkour instructor by night. As a kid, Levesque was plenty athletic but never had the constitution for team sports. While at Northeastern University in Boston, Levesque started training in parkour. He had the requisite speed and strength and coordination to improve quickly and found that the notion of "athletics without competition or rivalries" fed something inside him.

"There's so much self-fulfillment in moving freely without fears or restrictions," says Levesque, who currently organizes free parkour lessons around San Francisco. "You definitely apply this to your life. You do something you once thought was physically impossible and that job interview doesn't seem so intimidating."

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