Dan Iaboni: Traceur, teacher, role model

In a flutter of footsteps and with a great leap, his arms grab hold of a ledge and legs compress against a wall. Using the stored momentum in his muscular limbs, he springs backwards into a flip, sailing into an upwards arc just feet from onlookers. However, something goes awry: he hesitates for a moment before he lifts off from the wall and ends up sprawled sideways in mid-air, hurtling towards the ground.

In the back of his mind, he might have patted himself on the back for digging a pit and filling it with safety foam. Climbing out of the pit unscathed, he discusses his mistake with his peers and decides that he would have to commit to the jump fully in the future. He would have to stop thinking, and just do it.

If there was a way for a man to fly under his own power, Dan Iaboni would have found it by now. Iaboni is a practitioner of parkour, a term which originates from the French term parcours du combattant, a method of training the military with an obstacle course. Parkour is a discipline that involves treating everyday objects like low walls, rails, and ledges as obstacles in a quest to get from point A to point B as efficiently as possible.

Due to reports of individuals injuring themselves while taking part of parkour, some mainstream media outlets regard parkour as dangerous. Iaboni believes this is due to a lack of proper training and wants to change people’s perception. Today he stands before roughly 30 fellow parkour practitioners, or traceurs, each with varying levels of experience. They come from areas such as Hamilton, Scarborough and Pickering as part of a pre-planned meet-up between those areas’ parkour clubs and Iaboni. He pushes them to work hard and complete the gruelling workout in order to waive five dollars off their usually-$15 gym fees: working hard bears rewards.



Iaboni’s eager charges will learn parkour from an expert. Iaboni was born and raised in Toronto, where as a youth he participated in basketball, soccer and weight-lifting; his life-long athleticism has resulted in a muscular body hidden under training clothes. It wasn’t until 2003 that Iaboni would view a video of traceurs on the internet, and his interest in parkour began.

“I basically said, ‘I want to copy that guy in the video,’ and then, ta-da, six years later, here we are."

At that time parkour in Canada was virtually non-existent, and Iaboni, as well as other interested Canadians, were registered on a British site called Urban Freeflow. During his early years of parkour, Iaboni spent much of his time experimenting due to a lack of guidance.

"At first we didn't know what we were doing, and we really sucked. A lot of the stuff we were doing was probably really dangerous, but there was no one else around at that time, so it was hard to get started. "

Though Iaboni’s home in Canada hampered his initial development, it was his location and bilingualism that helped him gain a chance to train with David Belle, parkour’s French creator.

“[In] 2005 I lucked out, because they needed some translators for a movie promotional tour they were doing in the States,” he said. “I spoke French and was doing Parkour in North America, so I got to tag along. There [Belle] thought I was a cool guy, so he [said] ‘You should come back to France to train.’”

Iaboni trained with Belle twice more, in parkour’s birthplace of Lisses, France, and again the next year during another American tour. Iaboni brought the knowledge he gained from Belle back to Canada in order to start teaching others what he had learned.

“He [Belle] showed me that everything I had done up to 2005 was basically goofing around, that I wasn't training hard enough and that he takes it a lot more seriously than people are taking it here [in Canada]."

Iaboni takes parkour seriously now, leading the Canadian parkour community with lessons learned from Belle and his own practice. Though he went to university for web design, Iaboni now does parkour full-time, earning his living through gym fees and holding seminars for outsiders, like corporate teams and children’s birthday parties.

In 2005 Iaboni started PKTO.ca, an informational website and forum for traceurs in the GTA. The web site was created in order to foster the growing parkour population, which the website’s current user count puts at over 2000 members.

“[In] 2004, all these other kids started coming [online] and we were like 'Hey, we should really try to make a local site so they don't go kill themselves starting off the way we did,'” said Iaboni.

PKTO.ca holds weekly meet-ups in various areas of the Toronto area, accepting all comers who are willing to learn. Winter, however, has hampered a traceur’s movement; wet concrete, ice-laden rails and slippery surfaces can spell instant doom in a sport where grip, precision, and spacial awareness are everything.

Instead of hibernating for the winter, Iaboni has taken refuge inside The Monkey Vault, his specialized training gym. Opening this past year, The Monkey Vault was a former carpet factory that was transformed with a little elbow grease into the Canadian embassy for parkour. Iaboni constructed much of the gym equipment and funded the renovations himself: blocks to vault over were assembled from wood, 2X4 beams were fastened to the wall for climbing and a safety pit was hand-dug and filled with foam cubes. The floor gives its passengers a bit of spring in their step due to 1500 polyethylene blocks under a layer of gymnastics carpeting, designed to cushion falls and give that little bit of extra boost in a jump. There are areas for weight training and relaxation, but privileges to the latter area must be earned. The Monkey Vault’s website states that “In order to go up [to the lounge] and play/watch a movie, you MUST complete a workout. If you come to the training centre just to play video games, you will be blacklisted.”

“I like doing parkour in here right now because there’s so many crash mats; the safety part of it’s amazing,” said Curtiss Randolph, 15. But when the summer comes, you’re going to have to face your fears and try it [outside].”

For Iaboni, training others has its own rewards. Parkour’s focus is one of non-competitiveness and personal growth, and after taking part in numerous sports as a child, this new activity brought a change to his competitive mindset.

"[Teaching] ended up doing a lot of good because it taught me a lot about why I do this and instead of finding some motivation for me to beat everyone -like how I felt in basketball, I had to beat everyone- this is more like 'Man I just want to get along with everyone and I want to see everyone grow,’” said Iaboni. "Seeing someone else learn something was just as good as seeing myself learn something.”

Iaboni’s motivational personality and passion for parkour emanate to his students, who enjoy learning from someone who treats them as equals.

“I think he done a great job. He’s very positive when you’re learning, and also he can do what he teaches you; it’s not like having a teacher that can’t do anything, or someone who’s washed up. He influences you because he’s so good at what he does,” said Randolph. Ionatan Waisgluss, 18, a cognitive science major at University of Toronto, agrees with him. A traceur for four years, Waisgluss recalled his first meeting with Iaboni during a parkour meet-up in Mississauga. Waisgluss did not know of Iaboni’s status within the parkour community, but recognized his helpfulness and patience with students. “We don't treat him like a superstar, but he is really helpful,” said Waisgluss.

Being treated like a celebrity is not on Iaboni’s agenda. He stresses that The Monkey Vault accepts people of all skill levels if they are willing to be taught.

"I don't want to see it to the point where it's like, 'Sorry, you're not allowed in here because we're the better people,’” he said. "When you see a guy do something he's never done before, well, I think back to when I first started and we couldn't vault over a rail. Seeing that [success] in them now is an awesome feeling. It's like, 'Wow, I'm actually helping these people not screw up like I [did] at the beginning.'”

Iaboni steadies himself for a second attempt at the back flip. The determination is evident on his face, his concentration filtering out the distractions around him. He sprints forward and plants himself on the wall as before, only this time there is no hesitation. He jumps, and hits the landing perfectly. As he comes out of the pit, the onlookers look on with smiles on their faces, inspired to follow his lead. Iaboni doesn’t hesitate to instruct others on their own flips, his own satisfaction brimming on his face.