May 16, 2017

Meet Kurt Gowan of Parkour Ways

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kurt Gowan.

Kurt, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I was working in electronics retail for years after high school and felt that I had no purpose to my life. I was going to work to earn the paycheck just so I could return to work the next day. It was an endless – and pointless – loop.

I came across a Parkour video on YouTube in 2008. I had seen Parkour before, though I don’t recall where I originally saw it. I think it was the Nike commercial featuring Sébastien Foucan, one of the original founders of the discipline, chasing a chicken. I came across the YouTube video at a time that I think was just right for me to see it. I needed something to my life, I needed to add something other than work. I realized that starting Parkour on my own required nothing other than going out and giving it a try. My family had been quite poor since 2001, so this was good. All I needed was my body and some free time (I had a lot of free time back then!). I went out for the first time to try to figure out how to get started with some of the movements in 2008. It wasn’t a very successful day. A few days later, it began to snow and so I was convinced it would have to wait until after winter. I know now of course that this is not true, but back then I had no idea what I was doing!

In 2009, I began to train more regularly. I started to meet people in Chicago that were also training and I would drive out from the Illinois/Indiana border, where I live, a few times every week to train. That quickly became less financially feasible (to be honest, it wasn’t financially feasible to begin with). In early 2010 I found a small group of guys in northwest Indiana that were also training. I made plans to meet up with them and soon after, I was spending more of my training time with them. Some of them had already been teaching and one of them was even certified. I didn’t even know that certification was possible back then. I got into teaching while I was attending their classes every week. John Conway, the guy who was certified, would have me assist in teaching once in a while and it started to become a regular thing for me to help teach. Before I knew it, I was a part of their organization.

In between summer and fall of 2011, I was considering heading to Columbus, Ohio to attend an ADAPT (Art du Déplacement and Parkour Teaching) certification course run by Parkour Generations and hosted by Parkour Horizons. I wasn’t sure whether this was the right decision to make and it was quite expensive for me. Something inside me told me it was the right thing for me to do, that it was the path I should follow. I made the decision to go and spent pretty much all of the money I had at the time in order to do it. When I got back from the course, I knew that this was something that I really wanted to do and so I started to think about how I could make it work for me. I spent months planning things out: sourcing materials to make equipment, searching for the best costs on those materials, figuring out how to build the equipment, deciding on pricing, building a website, designing logos, trying to find places that would be interested in my classes, the whole package!

By February 2012 I had most of what I needed sorted out and I launched my classes at a gym that was called Vie Personal Fitness at the time, on North Kingsbury Street. It was very small and very slow in the beginning, most of my classes were empty and I had no money to do any kind of marketing (I had no experience in marketing, either). It slowly grew in to what it is today. Now I teach all over Chicagoland and in the suburbs throughout the year, working with gyms, schools, running indoor and outdoor classes, private lessons, workshops and other events. I have now been teaching a class at Chicago Waldorf School – an actual Parkour class in their school day, all of the high school students take it – since January 2014. As far as I know, my seniors that are graduating this year are the first to have had an actual Parkour class through all 4 years of high school in Illinois, possibly even in the entire US! In 2012 I was also approached to do some stunt work for Shameless, which led to other stunt work on shows like The Mob Doctor and Chicago PD, and films like Dhoom 3 and Divergent. I’ve had 6 other people certified so far and 5 of them are working with me on some things year-round, helping with events, teaching their own classes, or assisting in other ways.

I have had the pleasure of teaching thousands of people of all ages and skill levels over the past six and a half years and I could not be happier about what I do now. It may not make much money, I am still struggling financially much of the time, but there is nothing else I would rather be doing with my life. Parkour grew from being something I sought out as a fun pastime to being an invaluable tool for me to learn about, understand and improve myself. It has helped me find confidence in overcoming the many challenges I have had to face in my life and a way to help others do the same. I can work for myself doing what I love, and I can help others experience those positive benefits of the discipline without having to conform to some sort of corporate guidelines or the rules of someone else’s business. I offer my teaching to everyone – no matter their financial situation. I created a very simple financial hardship program so that anyone who wants to learn this has the ability to. That is very important to me – that we share the values and benefits of the discipline with anyone who seeks it. It’s not about making money and it’s not about getting famous. It’s not about competitions and energy drinks like some have made it out to be. It’s about finding strength and using it to help others.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The road has definitely not been smooth. I’m not even sure where to begin on the struggles. As I said, my family had been rather poor since 2001 and things got much harder when my mom died of cancer in 2010. I had credit card debt and school loan debt (I was going to school for computer engineering, but dropped out because I realized that it was not the path I wanted for myself anymore), like many other people. I am at risk of losing my house almost annually because it is hard for me to keep up with paying the property taxes. The water has been shut off a few times. There was a hole in the roof for a few years where the rain would actually come in and it would rain in the living room closet! The kitchen sink once was backed up for over a year and I would use a bucket down underneath it that I’d have to empty into the toilet when it got filled up. I haven’t had a working oven for about 3 years now. In 2014, my brother left the house when we thought we were going to lose it to a tax sale because he hadn’t been able to pay his part of the property taxes. I was looking at apartments in Chicago, but because they were so much more expensive than keeping the house (the mortgage was paid off by then), I decided to stay in the house and pay the property taxes myself. I came home one night to find that my brother and his girlfriend had left and they had taken almost everything with them. The washing machine, the dryer, pots and pans, plates, silverware, the lawn mower, even the light bulbs, door knobs, and the shower head. I thought the house had been broken into until I realized what was going on. I had to spend a lot of money to get the house back in order. To this day there are still a lot of things wrong with the house.

As for struggles with the business, one of the hardest things was not knowing how, or even if, things were going to work out in the beginning. There were very few people coming in for the classes, many of them had just one student in them and I had no way to get the word out. I was driving back and forth from the city all the time, using up gas and putting wear and tear on my car. Finding insurance was hard to do when that became necessary, as Parkour has had this stigma in the US that it is about dangerous jumps from building to building or that it is only done by reckless young boys begging for attention. This could not be further from the truth, and it’s something I’ve had to work very hard to change peoples’ minds about in the Chicago area.

In addition to that, I never had money to hire any help for anything. So the coding and design of the website, the graphic design for logos or print materials and other graphics, the video editing, answering phone calls, answering emails, lesson planning and teaching the classes, coordinating for events, trying to figure out marketing, getting materials for and building the equipment – I was literally doing everything. To this day I am doing most of these things myself still. It can be very overwhelming at times. I do have help with some of it now, and that certainly makes things easier and I am grateful to those that are helping me. We’ve got a great little community of students who have been helpful over the years too.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Parkour Ways – what should we know?
What sets Parkour Ways apart from others that are teaching “Parkour” in the Chicago area is that we are trying to remain authentic to the discipline and the founders. For me this is what I want my life to be about – it has nothing to do with money. We see now that there are so many facilities, gymnastics gyms and other places that are jumping on the opportunity to start up a “Parkour” program to make some additional income. It’s not right. They don’t even know what it is. I think they see the movements, and maybe they can perform some of them, and so they assume that they understand the discipline and how to teach it. It’s not just about the movement though! There is so much more to it. We also see a lot of connections trying to be made between Parkour and American Ninja Warrior. They are not the same! People should know this. Yes, Parkour training can and does help people prepare for an obstacle course like that. Yes, Parkour Ways could even help you with that. But it is very important that the people learning with us understand that they are very different things. Our discipline is not supposed to be competitive. “Freerunning” is another term often used interchangeably with “Parkour”, though it is a bit different. It is not supposed to be competitive either. The third name for the discipline, Art du Déplacement (this is actually what I prefer to call it, but most in the US know it by the word Parkour), is the same. None of it is competitive!

I’ve brought some of the founders, a group called the Yamakasi, out to Chicago to train with us and run workshops with us a few times. This is incredibly important to me. When you think of any other discipline like ours – martial arts, gymnastics, many forms of dance – they started a very long time ago and the people who started them are not alive today. With Parkour, these guys are not only still alive but they are still training and still teaching! I’ve learned a lot from watching them, listening to them, talking with them, and training with them. We try to stay true to the discipline, because this is how people will get the most benefit from it.

Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
There are several people who contributed largely to helping me with Parkour Ways throughout the years. John Conway was the guy who helped changed my perspective of the discipline. He opened my eyes to a deeper side of it and helped me to see that it wasn’t just about doing tricks. He was also the one to get me into teaching, and to make me aware that the ADAPT certification existed. Anne Ewasko was one of the first to help with the business, providing me with funds to build some of the first pieces of equipment. She helped me organize thoughts and figure out pricing in the beginning. She also helped me find someone to help build the equipment as I was new to building things. Yvon Bignet was the owner of Vie Personal Fitness, the first facility in Chicago to host my classes indoors (Anne Ewasko later bought the gym from him and she once again played a big role in helping my business during that time). Kristin Schrepferman and Paige Ben-Dashan were parents of students that were incredibly supportive in the early days when I didn’t have many students. Noah LaPorte later bought that same facility on North Kingsbury Street and turned it into what is now Goose Island CrossFit – he was awesome and helped us continue what we were doing for as long as he could in his facility before we just didn’t fit anymore. Brent Holten at i.d. gym on North Lincoln Avenue has been another amazing facility owner that has helped us in an enormous way while providing us with space to run indoor classes. Jeffrey Strening would help teach and work other events with me back in 2012. Gerardo Carpio has been teaching with Parkour Ways since I took him to get certified in 2013 and continues to help with teaching today. David Yip, Jessy Hernandez, Brian Reyes, and Angela Martin were all certified at a course I hosted in 2014 at Goose Island CrossFit and have been helping since. The Chicago Waldorf School has also been a major contributor to the (what I consider to be) success of Parkour Ways as they brought me in for a stable teaching position at the start of 2014. Stunt coordinators like Tom Lowell, Rick LeFevour, Jimmy Fierro, and Chris Nolte have helped me out in a big way financially by finding stunt work for me when they can (without that occasional work, the business probably would have failed years ago as I would have struggled much more financially). I’d also like to mention Don Quinlan and Jill Parisi at the Lattof YMCA in Des Plaines for letting me work with their facility occasionally since 2013. Travis Tetting, who runs Axiom Parkour in Wisconsin, has been one of my go-to friends when I need to discuss things with another Parkour organization owner. None of this would have been possible without the thousands of students I’ve had over the years, and the thousands of people from around the world that I have had the opportunity to train or to talk about Parkour with. Of course, I also need to mention Yann Hnautra, Laurent Piemontesi, Chau Belle, and the rest of the Yamakasi founders because they were the ones to create the discipline and spread it around the world!

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