Welcome to Vision Parkour Gym, the first dedicated parkour training center on the San Francisco Peninsula. We're planning to open in March of 2023.

Parkour teaches you to move through your environment efficiently and creatively. Athletes learn to safely jump, land, swing, vault, and flip over real obstacles in their own way. They gain balance, strength, flexibility, confidence, and problem solving skills. Parkour teaches outstanding physical fitness in a completely fun way. 

We'll teach parkour classes for ages 6 years and up. We're also planning to begin summer camps in June, 2023. 

We haven't selected our exact location yet, we're still evaluating different places, but we know the gym will be located somewhere between Millbrae and Palo Alto.

We're going to start by renting out of an existing space which doesn't already have parkour classes. We'll spend the first year getting enough clients and getting the business running smoothly, and then we'll lease our own larger space and start building that out. We're planning to make sure that our permanent gym will be within 5 miles of our starting location, to make it an easy transition for our members.  

Icarus has already made designs for what both spaces might look like. Here are the blocks, mats, and structures we'll build for the smaller space to start out. Everything tucks away neatly in the corner for storage when we're not teaching classes:

And here are a few pictures to give you an idea of our vision for the larger space:

What We Need

We'll be using the money from this campaign in three important areas:

1. Top quality safety equipment, including Norbert's blocks and a selection of mats.

2. Gym management software, for an easy class sign-up experience. 

3. A down payment on our gym insurance through a trusted, industry leading firm. 

What You Get

We have a variety of rewards for donating to our gym.

• When you donate $25 we'll give you a Vision Parkour Gym sticker you can put on your water bottle or laptop. 

• When you donate $50, you'll get to choose between two limited edition t-shirts (preliminary images below) which are only available now while the IndieGoGo is up. We'll also give you a shout out on social media, and we'll put your name or Instagram handle on the wall in our first gym.

• When you donate $100, you get all the previous rewards, plus you get to help us graffiti the wall in the alleyway section of our permanent gym. We'll let you paint anything within reason.

• For $250, you get a 1-month class membership in addition to all the previous rewards.

• For $1000, you get a full 1-year class membership and all the previous rewards. This level is the best value, you get a full year for the price of approximately 4 months! 

Please donate what you can to help us start our gym. Every dollar helps us reach our goal of being able to bring parkour to new athletes. 

About Us

• Icarus Switkes, Founder and Head Coach (Instagram: @thewallmonkey)

Icarus has been practicing parkour since 2013 and coaching professionally since 2018. Their specialties include wallruns, cat leaps, and big drops. As a coach Icarus teaches athletes to learn the basics and then to find and overcome their own creative challenges. 

Icarus began competing in elite competitions when they were 15 years old. In 2019 their team took first place in the youth category at the West Coast Parkour Championships. In 2022 Icarus won first place in the individual Skill Final Competition.

• Jon Switkes, General Manager

Jon was a competitive gymnast growing up and would have loved to train at Parkour, but unfortunately it had not been invented yet! Jon has become involved through his son Icarus and their creativity and passion for the sport. 

Jon currently leads a Manufacturing Operations team at a fortune 500 company. He is excited to have found his next personal challenge, bringing his business and organizational skills to the Vision Parkour project.

The Impact

When you donate you'll be helping us create a parkour gym for people in this area. We can spread our love of parkour and teach new people. We can also give people a place to train indoors so they can work on more challenging moves that they wouldn't want to try outside.

Parkour is an amazing sport for everyone, especially for youth and teens who don’t fit in the standard mold of existing team sports programs. Parkour lets us each be individuals, developing skills together and exploring our own personal styles. Vision Parkour will bring the benefits of this great sport to the youth of the San Francisco peninsula.

Risks & Challenges

Our path to success has several milestones along the way. 

• To start teaching classes we'll need enough money to buy awesome equipment, gym management software, and insurance.
  • We're on our way to doing that now, with this IndieGoGo campaign!  
• Before we can move into a bigger gym, we'll need enough clients to support the business.
  • The demand for parkour instruction has been proven at more than a dozen successful gyms in other parts of California, and many more across the country. 
• Along the way we'll hire more coaches who share our expertise and motivation. 
  • The parkour community is thriving and we are sure to connect with the right partners who share our vision.

Other Ways You Can Help

You can support our gym by visiting our website, visionparkourgym.com, where you can join our contact list to get updates about the gym. You can also follow us and share our posts on Instagram @visionparkour, and tell people you know about our classes so they can learn parkour when we open.

Please reach out if you'd like to talk personally about other ways you can get involved. You can email us at info@visionparkour.com.

Thank you for supporting Vision Parkour Gym!