My Parkour Journey: 2010-present

Video games are good for you?

My dad walked into my room one day and said he was going to Walmart and wanted to know if I wanted him to pick up a new video game while he was there. I wasn’t really the kind of kid to stay on top of the latest trending games, so I didn’t get new games very often. But he’d never asked me this before, so I felt like it’d be dumb to not see if there were any good ones I should get.

That’s how I found Mirror’s Edge. It had come out recently (if you call 2 years ago “recent”) and it looked really cool. It was only later after playing the game for a bit and finding its Wikipedia page that I would find out about this discipline called parkour. Turns out, it’s something people can learn on YouTube, and obviously, that was all I needed to hear. Playing the game was fun, but it seemed cool that I might be able to do some of that stuff in real life.

Taking the leap

I started learning parkour in 2010 as a 16-year-old (feel free to do the math) living in Burlington, WI. During my first year of parkour, I learned everything by watching YouTube tutorials and trying out the movements in public parks. Eventually I roped some of my friends into it.

One of the tutorials that helped me back in the day was this roll tutorial from a group called 3Run:

Here’s another one from Ryan Doyle that also helped me a lot:

I would be practicing these rolls in my parents’ basement on the carpet trying not to bump into the couch, because I was starting to learn about parkour in February 2010, which was peak Wisconsin winter. It was too snowy and icy to see flat ground anywhere and I didn’t feel confident yet rolling on hard or slippery surfaces.

I can’t tell you how many different tutorials I watched on rolls, step/safety vaults, speed vaults, kong vaults, etc., but I must have watched half of parkour YouTube by the time that first year was up.

Finding my tribe

Then I found the Wisconsin Parkour coaching org based in Madison, WI. I attended their first WIPK Jubilee in the summer of 2011, where the WIPK coaches collaborated with 3 Parkour Generations coaches who flew in from London to give a 3-day workshop in downtown Madison and Devil's Lake State Park. This was really the spark for me, and where I discovered my love for the community aspect of parkour.

Here’s the schedule from the 2017 Jubilee so you can get an idea of what went on at these events:

After the event, I continued to follow WIPK and I eventually took some classes through them. I continued to attend the annual Jubilee events. At some point, I found out about ADAPT coaching certifications, which are globally recognized as the gold standard for parkour coaching. It turns out all the WIPK coaches had their Level 1 cert. I liked teaching and still do, so I decided this was something I wanted to pursue.

Stepping up

In 2014, I took the ADAPT Level 1 course in Chicago at Parkour Ways, and by 2015 I had finished my supervised assistant coaching hours and completed my ADAPT Level 1.

There was a Move Like The Wind 2014 event held after the ADAPT L1 course where I and the other assistant coach candidates got to put our skills to use assisting the coaches:

In 2016, I co-founded the Whitewater Parkour Club at UW-Whitewater with a friend in the parkour community. It only lasted 2 years because all of us graduated at the same time, but we taught a lot of beginners how to do some basic parkour during that time.

Here’s the Facebook group where we coordinated training sessions and club meetings:

The school paper even did an article on us:

The Long Break

Between 2018-2024, I took a long break from the parkour community and went back to casually training alone. Most of this was because I was focused on building a happy relationship and getting married, and building a successful career as a software tester.

Also, I started gaining weight from the sedentary lifestyle that is the default for most tech careers. My wife has reminded me some of this might have been the “happy weight” couples can get when they’re going on a lot of dinner dates and binging Netflix together, and we definitely did a lot of that 🤣 I had never struggled with my weight, so this kind of snuck up on me. In 2022, I weighed 30 pounds more than I do today.

That extra weight — and the fact that I hadn’t trained very often in this “new body” — is probably why I injured myself doing a kong vault over a picnic table. I needed 9 months of physical therapy and 9 more months of barbell squats and other leg strengthening exercises before my knee was ready to do another kong vault over a picnic table.

During this time that I was rehabilitating my left patellar tendon, I lost over 20 pounds of fat and gained over 10 pounds of muscle. I built and sold a software testing bootcamp to 11 students, coaching 1 to graduation. I tripled the software tester salary I started my career with back in 2020. These 3 years from 2022-2024 were filled with a lot of internal and external transformation for me. I saw my life change in very big, very real ways.

But I felt like there was still something missing. I had a lot of nostalgia for the days when I was more involved in the parkour community. There were many moments when I was rehabbing my knee when I thought I might never be able to do parkour again. Those were the moments that I mourned my absence from the community the most, and wondered what could have been.

The call to community

Once 2025 rolled around, I was getting bored of the whole “software testing education business” thing. I was also feeling more motivated to help my local community after seeing my wife find joy as a library teacher at the elementary school. It reminded me of the days when I wanted to be a parkour coach.

We’d also been doing a lot of tourism in Door County as “new locals” since moving to Sturgeon Bay in July 2024, and I’d seen a lot of opportunities to help small business owners with their websites and marketing comms, but I wasn’t taking action on any of them. I wanted some of that community spirit that my wife was getting from her job, even if it would be just a weekend thing for me.

And I wasn’t so sure I wanted it to be all about tech anymore…

Return to the fold

I know I already told you I got my Level 1 back in 2015, but I still wasn’t aware of that back in February 2025. My memory at that point in time was that I had gotten some of my supervised hours done, but that I had waited too long and never finished the rest of them by the time of the deadline. So, I reached out to ADAPT Qualifications to ask about retaking the Level 1.

Turns out I had indeed finished the supervised hours and obtained my Level 1, and long story short, I ended up signing up for the Level 2 course offered in Boston in June 2025.

I completed the Level 2 course on June 28th, and that brings me to present day, as I write this backstory.

Community-building

I’m writing this to introduce myself to all the Door County locals who have never heard of me, or who want to know how I got into parkour.

The plan right now is to make people aware of the Facebook group and get some meetups scheduled, thereby sharing some of my parkour knowledge with Sturgeon Bay residents. I might print some business cards or flyers or something to make it easier to market the group.

In the meantime, I’m firming up a program plan for a parkour class at the Door County YMCA in Sturgeon Bay, and I plan to spread the word about that, too.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and I hope we can train together some day soon 😄