Vince Klapper has spent a lot of his life climbing walls and back-flipping off trash cans. “When I was like 14, I told my mom, ‘I’m going to be a ninja when I grow up,’ ” Klapper says. “And she was like, ‘Absolutely, go ahead, you can do it.’ ”
She was right. In 2007, Klapper found a word to describe his crazy stunts: parkour. He then spent four years serving in the Marines, including more than two years stationed in Japan—where he became an even bigger fan of the Japanese TV show Ninja Warrior. After returning stateside, he became a parkour instructor, and he recently took his high-flying ways to TD Garden as a member of the Celtics’ dunk team. And last year, he brought his YOLO spirit to TV, appearing on season six of the U.S. iteration, American Ninja Warrior.
Now he’s combining his love for both parkour and the show as the lead instructor—sorry, make that “master sensei”—at Gymja Warrior, a playground for American Ninja fanatics that opened early this year in Danvers.
“We really wanted to dedicate this to Ninja Warrior and parkour, and leave nothing out,” Klapper says. The space replicates much of what you see on the show: the running steps, three different sizes of the warped wall, the double salmon ladder, swinging ropes, hanging rings and the spider wall. Name an obstacle, and the Gymja folks can likely mimic it or plan to introduce it in the future. Daily classes cater to kids, but the facility also aims to lure workout warriors with nightly adult classes and open gym times, capitalizing on the trend toward extreme workouts like CrossFit and events such as Tough Mudder and Spartan Race.
It’s all the brainchild of Shahab Afsharian, who matches Klapper’s rugged spirit with an entrepreneurial one. Afsharian was likewise a fan of American Ninja Warrior, often watching with his three children, all under age 7; the next day he’d observe them trying to crown the next Ninja Warrior at the park. And when a parkour expert competed on the show, it only upped the excitement for his kids. So Afsharian soon started sketching plans for a gym that combined parkour with the show’s off-the-wall obstacles. He found the perfect location—a former basketball court inside the Danvers Indoor Sports facility—and then found the perfect instructor in the high-energy Klapper, who seems to have landed his dream job. Just like Mom said he would.
The response from my co-workers was far less encouraging when I announced that I was going to be a ninja for a day. The word “weak” may have been thrown around, and one of them said outright: “No offense, Matt, but I don’t think you can do this.”
Challenge accepted.
As soon as I enter the gym, I see it: the 15 1/2-foot warped wall, towering over all the other obstacles. But I’m nowhere near ready to tackle it yet. First comes some stretching and a lesson from Klapper on how to land—a key skill if you don’t want to leave on a stretcher. I practice jumping and landing like a frog, squatting down with my weight on my toes. Then I jump off some blocks and successfully stick the landing. I’m all toes! Visions of Kerri Strug dance in my head. Only I’m not injured. Not yet anyway.
To start, I’m faced with the smallest of the three warped walls. Klapper demonstrates—running, jumping, grabbing the top of the wall and pulling himself over—while Afsharian chimes in with the advice they give the kid climbers: Mimic Super Mario. I was never any good at video games, and it shows. With each attempt I progress a little farther, but I keep stalling out while trying to pull my body up to the top of the wall. This is the stunt that even the kids who work out at Gymja Warrior can do—what hope do I have for rest of the course if I can’t even get up the first damn wall?
Finally, after some more tips from Klapper, I make it to the top. But I resist the urge to raise my arms in triumph—I know the ropes are next. Afsharian tells me about one visitor who hit the gym for an open workout for parkour enthusiasts and former American Ninja contestants. He made it from a sitting position to the top of the 25-foot rope in 4 seconds flat. The ropes, however, are Klapper’s white whale. When he was on American Ninja, he was eliminated on them. “It was 3:30 am in St. Louis, and it was near freezing,” he recalls. “All I remember is losing my grip, and when I hit the water below, it felt almost like I was breaking through a bit of ice it was so cold.”
Needless to say, I pass on attempting the stunt of jumping from one rope to another. Instead, Klapper has me use the rope to jump off a stack of mats, trying to vault myself over a blue mat and safely onto a yellow one. I decide this could be one of the easier stunts. First jump, blue mat. Failure. Second jump, blue mat. Third jump, blue mat—but just barely. Finally, I swing back and let the rope take me safely to the yellow mat. Another success. This must be the course they use for the 10-year-olds’ birthday parties.
I move to the running steps, usually the starting stunt on the show. The goal is to make it from one side to the other without touching the ground, leaping from one slanted step to the next. With my extensive experience jumping puddles while running to catch the No. 9 bus, this seems up my alley. Klapper teaches me three ways to jump and land, and after a few attempts, I make it to the other side. I run it again in an attempt to raise my confidence, but I fail. I try again—and fail. Perhaps it’s best not to press my (beginner’s) luck.
“The baseline for doing rings and bars is three pull-ups,” Klapper says as we move to the rings. Uh-oh. Pull-ups had always been a problem for me during those grade-school fitness tests. I just never had much upper-body strength as a 10-year-old kid. My guess is more than 20 years of doing nothing to address that issue hasn’t improved matters.
Alas, in my case the confidence begins to fade as I move to the rings. No problem-solving prowess can help me mimic Klapper, who swings swiftly from one ring to the other. I grab onto one of the rings and just hang there, like the forgotten Christmas ornament you see dangling from a tree left on the curb after New Year’s. Rings are not for me.A pull-up is attempted. A pull-up is not completed. I’m still allowed to climb the diagonal bars, and Klapper adjusts one bar so I can push my feet off it and gain enough leverage to move up the bars. Up and down the bars I go. My confidence is bubbling over at this point, and that’s clearly an experience Afsharian wants to cultivate in all his customers, be they little kids, teens or adults. There’s a sign by the door listing gym mottos such as staying positive, solving problems and showing respect, and Klapper tailors each stunt to the customer’s ability.
Also not for me? The dreaded double salmon ladder—which tasks you with lifting a bar up a series of progressively higher pegs, while you dangle from the bar. I take one look and decide to forgo it. All that’s left is the warped wall. There are two versions before me. The 15 1/2-foot giant is even bigger than the 14-foot wall on the show, and when the Gymja guys held an open house in early January, they drew takers who drove from as far as 5 hours away just to try to scale it. One guy made it up on his first try, a feat that still had Klapper raving a week later. It usually takes him a couple of tries before he can “conquer the wall.”
The other warped wall is 11 feet high. It’s used for kids and some adults. If you’re younger than 12 and you make it to the top, you can sign your name on it. This wall seems perfect for me. Or at least, more realistic than the 15 1/2-footer.
Afsharian attempts to calms my nerves, telling me that a lot of people actually find this easier than the smaller, more curved wall I previously conquered. Once again, Klapper goes through the run, reaching the top and using the stairs to get down. If only I could use the stairs to get to the top.
I make a couple of runs up the wall, but I can’t even touch above 9 feet. Afsharian reminds me to reach up and backward to account for the curve. I focus in, sorting through all the tips, determined to reach the top. I make a run for it. One step, two steps, three and I reach, grabbing the top of the wall with my hand. Victory! But then… I can’t hold on. I come crashing down, banging my knee, leg and ankle on the padded ground. Klapper had taught me to slide down the wall, but in the moment, the lesson was forgotten. I gingerly get up. Later that night I discover that my fibula is fractured, but at that moment it’s my pride that’s most banged up.
As I sit nursing my wound on the sideline, the photographer tries to scale the smaller warped wall I’d climbed at the start of the lesson. “Don’t tell me he can do it without breaking a sweat,” I think to myself. With every unbroken bone in my body, I silently root for him to fail. He does. My pride is making a comeback.
Just then, Afsharian pulls out his phone to show me video of an 8-year-old kid climbing the 11-foot wall that had done me in. He reached the top. “That was his fourth time up the wall after his mother had told him he couldn’t do it,” Afsharian says.
“The thing that made me happy was his mom said, ‘You’re too small, you can’t do that,’ ” Klapper adds. “Then he did it. I was like, ‘Yeah, buddy, good.’ Prove yourself. If someone tells you that you can’t do something, prove that you can.”
My co-worker’s jeers—ahem, concerns—echo in my head. Had I failed in my mission to prove that I was indeed an alpha male (in an office predominantly populated by women)? Had my inability to scale a wall like Spider-Man brought shame to my clan? Nah. Just for having attempted it, I was walking pretty tall—broken leg and all.
Make It or Break It
Vince Klapper has spent a lot of his life climbing walls and back-flipping off trash cans. “When I was like 14, I told my mom, ‘I’m going to be a ninja when I grow up,’ ” Klapper says. “And she was like, ‘Absolutely, go ahead, you can do it.’ ”
She was right. In 2007, Klapper found a word to describe his crazy stunts: parkour. He then spent four years serving in the Marines, including more than two years stationed in Japan—where he became an even bigger fan of the Japanese TV show Ninja Warrior. After returning stateside, he became a parkour instructor, and he recently took his high-flying ways to TD Garden as a member of the Celtics’ dunk team. And last year, he brought his YOLO spirit to TV, appearing on season six of the U.S. iteration, American Ninja Warrior.
Now he’s combining his love for both parkour and the show as the lead instructor—sorry, make that “master sensei”—at Gymja Warrior, a playground for American Ninja fanatics that opened early this year in Danvers.
“We really wanted to dedicate this to Ninja Warrior and parkour, and leave nothing out,” Klapper says. The space replicates much of what you see on the show: the running steps, three different sizes of the warped wall, the double salmon ladder, swinging ropes, hanging rings and the spider wall. Name an obstacle, and the Gymja folks can likely mimic it or plan to introduce it in the future. Daily classes cater to kids, but the facility also aims to lure workout warriors with nightly adult classes and open gym times, capitalizing on the trend toward extreme workouts like CrossFit and events such as Tough Mudder and Spartan Race.
It’s all the brainchild of Shahab Afsharian, who matches Klapper’s rugged spirit with an entrepreneurial one. Afsharian was likewise a fan of American Ninja Warrior, often watching with his three children, all under age 7; the next day he’d observe them trying to crown the next Ninja Warrior at the park. And when a parkour expert competed on the show, it only upped the excitement for his kids. So Afsharian soon started sketching plans for a gym that combined parkour with the show’s off-the-wall obstacles. He found the perfect location—a former basketball court inside the Danvers Indoor Sports facility—and then found the perfect instructor in the high-energy Klapper, who seems to have landed his dream job. Just like Mom said he would.
The response from my co-workers was far less encouraging when I announced that I was going to be a ninja for a day. The word “weak” may have been thrown around, and one of them said outright: “No offense, Matt, but I don’t think you can do this.”
Challenge accepted.
To start, I’m faced with the smallest of the three warped walls. Klapper demonstrates—running, jumping, grabbing the top of the wall and pulling himself over—while Afsharian chimes in with the advice they give the kid climbers: Mimic Super Mario. I was never any good at video games, and it shows. With each attempt I progress a little farther, but I keep stalling out while trying to pull my body up to the top of the wall. This is the stunt that even the kids who work out at Gymja Warrior can do—what hope do I have for rest of the course if I can’t even get up the first damn wall?
Finally, after some more tips from Klapper, I make it to the top. But I resist the urge to raise my arms in triumph—I know the ropes are next. Afsharian tells me about one visitor who hit the gym for an open workout for parkour enthusiasts and former American Ninja contestants. He made it from a sitting position to the top of the 25-foot rope in 4 seconds flat. The ropes, however, are Klapper’s white whale. When he was on American Ninja, he was eliminated on them. “It was 3:30 am in St. Louis, and it was near freezing,” he recalls. “All I remember is losing my grip, and when I hit the water below, it felt almost like I was breaking through a bit of ice it was so cold.”
Needless to say, I pass on attempting the stunt of jumping from one rope to another. Instead, Klapper has me use the rope to jump off a stack of mats, trying to vault myself over a blue mat and safely onto a yellow one. I decide this could be one of the easier stunts. First jump, blue mat. Failure. Second jump, blue mat. Third jump, blue mat—but just barely. Finally, I swing back and let the rope take me safely to the yellow mat. Another success. This must be the course they use for the 10-year-olds’ birthday parties.
“The baseline for doing rings and bars is three pull-ups,” Klapper says as we move to the rings. Uh-oh. Pull-ups had always been a problem for me during those grade-school fitness tests. I just never had much upper-body strength as a 10-year-old kid. My guess is more than 20 years of doing nothing to address that issue hasn’t improved matters.
Alas, in my case the confidence begins to fade as I move to the rings. No problem-solving prowess can help me mimic Klapper, who swings swiftly from one ring to the other. I grab onto one of the rings and just hang there, like the forgotten Christmas ornament you see dangling from a tree left on the curb after New Year’s. Rings are not for me.A pull-up is attempted. A pull-up is not completed. I’m still allowed to climb the diagonal bars, and Klapper adjusts one bar so I can push my feet off it and gain enough leverage to move up the bars. Up and down the bars I go. My confidence is bubbling over at this point, and that’s clearly an experience Afsharian wants to cultivate in all his customers, be they little kids, teens or adults. There’s a sign by the door listing gym mottos such as staying positive, solving problems and showing respect, and Klapper tailors each stunt to the customer’s ability.
Also not for me? The dreaded double salmon ladder—which tasks you with lifting a bar up a series of progressively higher pegs, while you dangle from the bar. I take one look and decide to forgo it. All that’s left is the warped wall. There are two versions before me. The 15 1/2-foot giant is even bigger than the 14-foot wall on the show, and when the Gymja guys held an open house in early January, they drew takers who drove from as far as 5 hours away just to try to scale it. One guy made it up on his first try, a feat that still had Klapper raving a week later. It usually takes him a couple of tries before he can “conquer the wall.”
The other warped wall is 11 feet high. It’s used for kids and some adults. If you’re younger than 12 and you make it to the top, you can sign your name on it. This wall seems perfect for me. Or at least, more realistic than the 15 1/2-footer.
Afsharian attempts to calms my nerves, telling me that a lot of people actually find this easier than the smaller, more curved wall I previously conquered. Once again, Klapper goes through the run, reaching the top and using the stairs to get down. If only I could use the stairs to get to the top.
I make a couple of runs up the wall, but I can’t even touch above 9 feet. Afsharian reminds me to reach up and backward to account for the curve. I focus in, sorting through all the tips, determined to reach the top. I make a run for it. One step, two steps, three and I reach, grabbing the top of the wall with my hand. Victory! But then… I can’t hold on. I come crashing down, banging my knee, leg and ankle on the padded ground. Klapper had taught me to slide down the wall, but in the moment, the lesson was forgotten. I gingerly get up. Later that night I discover that my fibula is fractured, but at that moment it’s my pride that’s most banged up.
As I sit nursing my wound on the sideline, the photographer tries to scale the smaller warped wall I’d climbed at the start of the lesson. “Don’t tell me he can do it without breaking a sweat,” I think to myself. With every unbroken bone in my body, I silently root for him to fail. He does. My pride is making a comeback.
Just then, Afsharian pulls out his phone to show me video of an 8-year-old kid climbing the 11-foot wall that had done me in. He reached the top. “That was his fourth time up the wall after his mother had told him he couldn’t do it,” Afsharian says.
“The thing that made me happy was his mom said, ‘You’re too small, you can’t do that,’ ” Klapper adds. “Then he did it. I was like, ‘Yeah, buddy, good.’ Prove yourself. If someone tells you that you can’t do something, prove that you can.”
My co-worker’s jeers—ahem, concerns—echo in my head. Had I failed in my mission to prove that I was indeed an alpha male (in an office predominantly populated by women)? Had my inability to scale a wall like Spider-Man brought shame to my clan? Nah. Just for having attempted it, I was walking pretty tall—broken leg and all.
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