Parkour hits its stride on the Front Range

The internet has a way of distorting reality. A few months ago, my social media algorithm began feeding me a bottomless rotation of parkour videos. Sixty second clips of people jumping around in urban environments became inevitable whenever I opened Instagram. 

I assumed the late-aughts action sports fad was making a comeback. That, or I had once again fried my algorithm. But I was wrong.

The truth is, parkour never really left. 

“It’s been a solid, consistent thing for a while now,” says United States Parkour Association (USPK) Event Coordinator John Lunsford. “It’s no longer the ‘new thing.’” 

As the sport has been quietly establishing itself, the Front Range became a proving ground for athletes and competitions.

Leaps and bounds

After consuming the steady diet of wall climbing and urban roof jumping my Instagram discover page was feeding me week after week, a video popped up that stopped the doom scroll: a parkour athlete bounding in slow motion across the heads of Pearl Street’s bronze animal statues. 

I thought for sure if parkour had made it to Boulder’s pedestrian walkways, it must be on the rise. As it turns out, Colorado has become an incubator for the action sport.

“Colorado itself has been a really solid mainstay for parkour for a good number of years,” Lunsford says. In his eyes, there are three national parkour hubs: Southern California, the Northeast metro and the Centennial State. And it’s come a long way since vaulting onto the pop-culture scene in the early 2000s.

“When Casino Royale came out, that particular James Bond movie put parkour in front of a lot of people,” says Marquis Johnson, the Boulder-based athlete whose Instagram reel stopped me dead in my tracks. 

And of course, there’s the pervasive cold opening to a 2014 episode of The Office, featuring the hijinks of Dwight Schrute, Michael Scott and Andy Bernard somersaulting through cubicles, punctuating each anti-climatic landing by shouting “Parkour!” 

The sport is now shedding the internet-meme stigma, but busting out of the cocoon isn’t without its growing pains. 

“Parkour as a sport is sort of in its teenage years,” Lunsford says. He draws a parallel to skateboarding in the ’80s: a counterculture movement whose biggest names are regular people with day jobs — like Johnson, who’s got a full-time gig in retail sales. 

“What we see now is a good amount of organizations and people have worked out what to do and what works well,” says Lunsford.

That includes organizing local outreach and competition circuits. The USPK, one of several grassroots parkour organizations championing the sport, hosted its first nationals in Denver in 2022, and World Gymnastics officially adopted parkour as a discipline in 2018.

“At the same time, there's only so much investment on the commercial side in parkour,” Johnson says. “There isn't a lot of equipment to supplement someone advertising inside the parkour economy. So you have a lot of high-level athletes who, realistically speaking, are working class individuals.”

That’s where organizations like USPK come in: They’re focused on creating pathways for athletes to become professionals, by leveling up through local, regional and national competition circuits.

“Providing that framework and path is one of the biggest ways that we can see parkour being taken even more seriously,” Lunsford says.

Jammin’

While parkour grows, some athletes maintain one of its core principles is actually the lack of competition.

“Some people don't even want to be doing competitions in parkour, and that is literally fine. So, what we try to do then is jams,” Lunsford says. Jams are exactly how they sound — informal gatherings, aimed to create common ground for athletes with different parkour mindsets and philosophies

Jams can be anywhere — local gyms, festivals or just out in the neighborhood. Johnson has a series of jams coming up he’s dubbed the Obsidian Gathering (OG for short) with the goal to bring Black parkour athletes together. The events, held in Baltimore June 19-21 and later in Oakland June 26-28, are centered around Juneteenth.

“Like many sports, there aren't really spaces for athletes of color as a starting place to be highlighted within parkour,” Johnson says. 

He conceived the event with fellow athlete David Ivey in 2017, and this is the first year they’re showing up in two cities. 

“A lot of people who fall into our social category are working class and may not be able to afford to fly across the country,” he says. Obsidian Gathering is currently fundraising to support travel for athletes to the destination.

Parkour is inherently accessible: All you need is a space to explore, no experience or equipment required. Despite efforts to build pipelines for athletes and commercialize the sport, this aspect is what keeps it firmly grounded as a grassroots movement.

“At its core, we want people to participate,” Lunsford says. “It's not just the big roof gaps or the daredevil type of mindset. It's also the, ‘Hey, you are seeing me do this thing, come on in.’” 

While parkour continues to evolve, you’re likely to find athletes like Johnson out and about, practicing on Pearl Street or CU Boulder’s campus when they’re not clocked in at their day jobs.

“I see myself as a parkour athlete funding my life,” Johnson says. “People will ask, ‘What would you like to be doing?’ And it's just jumping around.”