He throws his body from rooftop to rooftop as if gravity doesn't matter. He vaults over picnic tables at a full sprint. He runs up walls — yes, up them — and flings himself off their narrow summits. Sometimes, he includes a somersault in his landing for flair.

But when Ozzi Quintero says he's going to jump onto the top of a 4-foot-high pipe railing the diameter of a beer can, then jump another 8 feet and land on a similar railing, you are certain he will fall with a bone-cracking thud.

The 27-year-old Quintero just smiles.

It's a warm morning in Kane'ohe, and Quintero, lean and muscled, wears a sheen of sweat after having bounced and bounded for half an hour near the entrance of Windward Community College. He has turned a section of walkway railings near a bus stop into his own private jungle gym.

Quintero squats slightly, coiling his muscles like a spring, and explodes forward.

He lands like a cat, his size 8 1/2 shoes perched atop the railing. Then he hops across the gap for another perfect landing.

This is parkour, a sport created in a Paris suburb in the 1990s by the son of an acrobat. Popular in Europe, it's catching on in the United States. In Hawai'i, Quintero is among its biggest boosters.

Parkour enthusiasts, known as traceurs, pride themselves on fluid movement as they charge through urban landscapes like commandos. They climb, vault, crawl, swing, hop and balance themselves in ways that seem impossible.

Throughout, their guerrilla gymnastics embrace a simple philosophy: There are no obstacles, only possibilities.

"Parkour is freedom of movement and freedom of mind," Quintero says. "If you can overcome your fears about what you are not supposed to be able to physically do, then you should be able to carry the same mindset into daily life."

HOOKED ON PARKOUR

Quintero is a relative newcomer to the sport, trying it for the first time last August after seeing parkour videos on YouTube. He had recently moved from San Diego to Hawai'i with his wife, a Marine truck driver stationed at K-Bay.

"What guy hasn't gone over a wall at least once trying to get somewhere?" Quintero says. "I watched the videos and decided I was going to try this. I thought it didn't look too hard."

His athletic background fit the preferred mold for traceurs. Quintero had studied various martial arts and gymnastics and was a breakdancer.

But he got so hooked on par-kour that he ditched his career in sales to promote the sport full time. His efforts united a small community of about 50 aspiring traceurs, most of whom had never heard of parkour — or one another — until they met Quintero. He found them through MySpace pages and ads for training partners.

Now Quintero is the Pied Piper of Hawai'i parkour.

He stars in instructional and conditioning videos that he makes himself, conducts regular training sessions at a Kane'ohe gymnastics facility and was recently filmed doing parkour for several local McDonald's commercials.

Every weekend, Quintero leads a core group of six traceurs in search of obstacles.

"When we go out, we don't look at buildings anymore," Quintero says. "We just look at the place and say, 'What else can we do, what else can we do, what else can we do?' "

One of the regulars is Richard Skowronski, a 20-year-old waiter from Salt Lake who discovered parkour three years ago when he lived in Ohio.

A wrestler, Skowronski was smitten from the first moment he saw the physical challenges of parkour. But then it changed his outlook on life.

"The more I got into it, the more the philosophy started to come to me," he says. "It is not about running and jumping over stuff, it is being able to express yourself through movement. Being able to go wherever you want. Some of the stuff I do blows my mind. I cleared that gap? Wow."

Skowronski met Quintero not long after moving to Hawai'i last October. Quintero found Skowronski's MySpace tributes to parkour and asked if he wanted to train. They've been exploring landscape ever since.

"If you get into parkour, if you get sucked into it like Ozzi and I, no matter where you go, you see possibilities," he says. "You can go walking down the street and you see a building and you say 'I can jump from that ledge to that ledge.' "

SAVED BY FITNESS

What saves them from frequent or serious injury, traceurs say, is fitness.

Quintero has designed routes that can turn a wall or a flight of stairs into a punishing workout. He put them on his Web site but says that newcomers often learn the parkour moves before their bodies are physically ready for the stress of repeated landings.

"I don't want people to think this is reckless jumping," he says. "It takes a lot of discipline and conditioning."

It also takes a little bit of fear.

"Fear is always a companion when we are doing parkour," he says. "Fear can get in your mind and tell you that you are going to get hurt. Repetition, conditioning and muscle memory will allow the fear to just keep your focus sharp."

Quintero has already willed himself off heights of 8 feet, which is high, but not as high as the one-story plunges featured on YouTube videos. The world's top traceurs routinely drop from one rooftop to another, falling 10 feet or more onto buildings several stories above the street.

That doesn't mean Quintero hasn't hurt himself.

Last October, while diving toward a small wall, Quintero's palms slipped over the top and he headed face-first for terra firma. Instinctively, he tucked into a roll. Normally, rolling is good. Not this time.

"The whole weight of my body, from the tips of my toes, landed on the top of my shoulder," he says.

The impact separated his right shoulder. Even healed, there's a thumb-shaped lump that Quintero can push up and down like a lever, but the experience hasn't stopped Quintero. It's a badge of courage, a point of reference for the next jump.

Jason Tripplett, 30, a waiter from Makiki, says parkour is "a way to weed out false fears." That's what he had to do recently while standing on a 5-inch wide ledge of a Downtown bank and contemplating a precision jump to a similar ledge nearly 6 feet away.

If Tripplett missed, he'd fall 15 feet to the sidewalk below.

"If you fall, you can get hurt, that's the scary thing," he says. "But at a point, there is a flash that says, 'Do it, you will make it.' As soon as I get that thought, I jump.' "

Moves like that are a marriage of strength and of survival traits dating back to the dawn of man. Quintero says he's relearning moves that allowed his ancestors to be the hunters, not the hunted. "It's a hidden ability or instinct that a human's body normally has," Quintero says. "We work on ground level and practice hundreds of times. We condition our body to get strong in order to be able to take the impact. Then we vault the wall over and over and over. It becomes instinct rather than thinking about what you are going to do."

Quintero's leaps of faith go one step further. "It's my way of feeling free of limitations society has programmed onto me. It's a form of art where the masterpiece is your body."

Reach Mike Gordon at mgordon@honoluluadvertiser.com.