SF Parkour

I went to a beginner class with SF Parkour near the Ferry Building today. Having never tried parkour, it was a bit nerve-​wracking. However, the folks at SF Parkour were great and I definitely improved by the end of the class! Highly recommend to try this next time there’s a chance.

I went to one of the SFPK beginner’s classes too and it was really well organized. A great group of dedicated practioners who volunteer their time to teach basic skills and help people at all levels work up to achieving whatever they want to learn.
There is a great Friday Night Beginner’s class that just started (Fridays at 7:00pm) on the 10^th Avenue side of the Richmond Branch Library (b/​w Geary and Anza). It’s taught by Andrey who is one of the most amazing traceurs that I have seen. There is nothing that he can’t do. .. but he always teaches beginners in incremental progression so that you have a good foundation to work from and you don’t get hurt trying things that you aren’t ready to do. He also does an occassional Saturday morning conditioning session at Mountain Lake Park at 10:00am, but you should probably RSVP to that if you are going so that he knows to wait for you. You can find most of these training sessions hidden in the sfpk forum, but the Friday night class is disguised under a title that hasn’t been updated yet, so it is under the forum as something like: «Beginner’s Trainign Session: Tuesday 8:30am» (but it is not on Tuesday and it is not at 8:30am…haha).
We did a cool trail restoration project with the Forest Service recently too and helped restore the trails down to Marshall’s Beach in the Presidio right behind Battery Godfrey.
Good times and fun group of people! Definitely look into classes with SFPK as well as BA Parkour as well. BA Parkour does conditioning on Monday evenings at 6:30pm at Kezar and holds jams on the weekends. You can find them at: baparkour. com.
Both great groups! And for the most part, all of the classes and events are free, so it’s a great way to work out, have fun, meet great people and save money on fitness, all at the same time!

SF Parkour is a community of people who love to practice parkour. Parkour is probably best defined through youtube:
and wikipedia:
, but for those with an aversion to hyperlinks, let’s just call it the art/​sport of jumping over, climbing up, generally looking cool moving around obstacles.
This particular community, like the sport itself, is expanding rapidly these days, with snowballing media attention including a high-​profile scene in a Bond movie («Casino Royale»), a video game («Mirror’s Edge»), a shoe (K Swiss Ariake), and a sprinkling of a few NYT articles.
After a few years of saying «that shit is dope,» and not thinking much of it, I finally stumbled upon SF Parkour and decided to have a go at parkour myself. It so happened that SF Parkour was hosting a beginner’s lesson on Berkeley campus this weekend. Perfect. I couldn’t convince anyone to go with me – pussies, you know who you all are — so I headed onto BART by myself Saturday morning. And it was probably the best experience I’ve had in a long time.
I was a little skeptical at first. Parkour makes for great youtube videos; the youtube population being what it is, I had to look through about ²⁄₃ of the group before I saw someone I could be sure was older than 16. (To be fair, i should stress that it was a beginner’s session.) There’s definitely something a little weird, at first, about being taught something by a 16-​year-​old high-​school kids. And you have to be prepared to get schooled by 14-​year-​old Asian newbies who are 100% energy, 0% body weight and can fly about twice as high as you. But get over your ego — it’s worth it.
I’m loving the sport so far. But I think even better was the beginner session the SF Parkour «Area Reps» put together. Everything was perfect. Good schpeal about the importance of safety and training. Taught me a lot of cool warmups and outdoor training exercises I liked so much I went and did them in Dolores Park today. Totally unrelatedly, running into friends while crawling on all fours up a hill along side frolicking dogs is a totally good way to get over any insecurities you might have about looking stupid.
After the conditioning, they set up 4 stations for key basic movements. They presented some good overarching keys to parkour, broke down each individual movement into a series of progressing drills, and gave helpful individual pointers when they noticed things going wrong with our form.
Oh yeah, and it’s free. Beat that.