Question #3

[RevvyAiny 0]

That's a great idea. Thanks!

[lurch 0]

Why?
Because I was scared of "missing the boat" in life and it seemed like a suitably impossible ambition.

Same as many, I had dreams of flight as a child. They were nice but depressing because I knew in reality, that awesome flying sensation will never happen. I never really connected that desire with skydiving.

Fast forward 20 years, I'd been kicking around various factories, no particular career, a scraggly heavy metal loser with a beat up 4x4, small-time adventurer. Going nowhere.
I was watching friends settle into grindingly repetitively normal lives. Couldn't see any escape from it myself. Watch movies or get any media exposure and its just frustrating... there are people out there living The Life, and they ain't here. They're always somewhere else.

I was getting increasingly nervous that one of these days I was going to wake up 68 years old having never done anything extraordinary with my life and realize I'd missed the one and only opportunity I was ever going to have to really LIVE.

Long time ago running with a carnival I stumbled on Skydive Pepperell. As a 19 year old carny, the 220$ tandem was more than I made in a week. Soon as I saw the price I shook my head in frustration and walked out. But not without a long wistful look back seeing these laughing hooting people landing. Impossible dream, but wouldn't it be awesome to be one of THEM...?

Years later with a job that paid enough, I came back and did a tandem. Barely remember it really. Hell of a treatment for depression. Just total mind-annihilating sensory overload. Staggered around for the next several days in a shocked happy daze, like holy crap I don't believe what just happened. But damn, that was cool.
Did one a year for a few years. Each one blew my mind and left me in a happy daze for quite awhile. I wanted more. Began considering AFF, found out it cost more money than I'd ever had at one time in my life and shelved it for a few more years. But I started saving.

Then one day armed with several thousand dollars and a kamikaze attitude of get an A-license or die trying, I marched onto the DZ out of nowhere and signed up.

I honestly figured it was a suicide mission. I was out of my depth, I was definitely NOT as badass as THOSE people and I was pretty certain I was going to panic, screw up and get killed. But I figured better to go out in an honest to god attempt to live a little and achieve something, even if that thing was beyond my measure and I failed at it.

It didn't turn out that way. First season of jumping was the most glorious summer of my life to date, scared witless and loving it, soundtrack to my life at the time was Andrew W.K's "I Get Wet", an album of rousing anthems that were perfect for taking on the world with a maniacal grin. I had my A-license by midsummer and began to believe, just a little, that maybe I've got what it takes to survive this after all. I'm not dead yet, right?

Late that season I first learned of the existence of wingsuits. I saw a video of a couple of early birds in red and white Classics surfing a cloud together and it raised the hair on my neck like "My GOD... they can DO that!?" Some, at the forefront of it, could fly for almost 2 whole minutes per skydive.
Most importantly though, I suspected what flying one of those things might feel like. There was a certain hunch, like that ultimate dream of flight, that totally impossible one, that one I used to wake up from feeling like a million bucks because I could fly, only to be disappointed because it could never be real...
No way...
Maybe. Just maybe.
End of second season I had 200 jumps and suddenly encountered an early Birdman instructor. Ready or not, here's your chance, take it!
I took it. I figured it was gonna go one of two ways. One, I was gonna feel like I just chucked myself out a plane with my arms and legs tied, struggle unstable the whole way down in a nightmare panic and say screw this, if I survived it. The other way I hoped it'd go, it'd feel like the most natural thing in the world. Anyone who'd seen my first 2 years could have told you everything I'd done up till then led up to that moment.

Anyway, up I went, jumped out, and the second I spread the wings and simply stopped falling, I knew this was it. That flying sensation I'd been chasing after. It was real. I had a Classic and he had a top of the line S-3 but I left my instructor behind like he was standing still, last I saw of him he was a small golden dot way back there somewhere.

Fast forward 8 more years and 2500+ wingsuit flights and I'm still at it, and those years have been a glorious whirlwind of adventure. I can fly for 4 minutes and around 7 miles depending on winds. I've competed internationally and participated in the biggest and baddest wingsuit formations ever done. I've surfed clouds that were so cosmic I was left speechless and giggling. I've got the most incredible collection of high quality friends imaginable to share it all with.

I get hugged a lot.

I do my damndest to take care of my friends as well as humanly possible in return. I've spent more of my life than I have any right to, laughing.
I have absolutely no regrets.
I would not trade this life for any amount of money, or anything at all. If someone told me they could rewind my life and I get to do it over, but they give me 10 million dollars under the condition that I never, ever try to fly, I would tell them to get screwed.

And that fear I used to have, that one about missing out on life? Yeah, that fear has had its ass kicked.

-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[airtwardo 6]

Beautiful....just fuckin' beautiful!

~ If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? ~

[Marinus 0]

I made the decision to make a tandem jump when I saw a YouTube vid of a tandem exit. The realization that I didn't have to jump from the plane myself, but that someone went along to (more or less) push me from the plane was the most decisive factor. Before that I was curious about skydiving, but I figured that the plane would probably run out of fuel before I would have scraped together enough courage to jump from it.

[oldwomanc6 38]

Keep these stories coming.

lisa
WSCR 594
FB 1023
CBDB 9

[mrubin 0]

Skydiving was something that I had talked to my friends about but never thought I would actually go through with. Then one day a friend called me and said that she was going skydiving and invited me to join her. I thought "Why the hell not?" and went expecting to do one jump and be good for the rest of my life. Before my feet hit the ground I knew that skydiving was something that I needed to do again and again. I'm so thankful to my friend for inviting me to go because it opened a new world full of great times and some of the most amazing people I ever met.

"I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[ShcShc11 0]

Quote

Anyway, up I went, jumped out, and the second I spread the wings and simply stopped falling, I knew this was it. That flying sensation I'd been chasing after. It was real. I had a Classic and he had a top of the line S-3 but I left my instructor behind like he was standing still, last I saw of him he was a small golden dot way back there somewhere.

Fast forward 8 more years and 2500+ wingsuit flights and I'm still at it, and those years have been a glorious whirlwind of adventure. I can fly for 4 minutes and around 7 miles depending on winds. I've competed internationally and participated in the biggest and baddest wingsuit formations ever done. I've surfed clouds that were so cosmic I was left speechless and giggling. I've got the most incredible collection of high quality friends imaginable to share it all with.

I get hugged a lot.

I do my damndest to take care of my friends as well as humanly possible in return. I've spent more of my life than I have any right to, laughing.
I have absolutely no regrets.
I would not trade this life for any amount of money, or anything at all. If someone told me they could rewind my life and I get to do it over, but they give me 10 million dollars under the condition that I never, ever try to fly, I would tell them to get screwed.

And that fear I used to have, that one about missing out on life? Yeah, that fear has had its ass kicked.

-B

Wow. Nice story!

[kallend 1,621]

One of my freshman advisees wanted to start a skydiving club, and I offered to be the club "faculty advisor". I tagged along when he organized a group of students to make tandem jumps. I enjoyed it so much I made 2 more jumps the same day, and signed up for AFP.

I had about 200 jumps when I went to Quincy in 1999 and saw a wingsuit demo (I think by Jari Kuosma), and decided that I just had to do that.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[oldwomanc6 38]

Keep these stories coming. I love 'em! This was what I was hoping for.

lisa
WSCR 594
FB 1023
CBDB 9

[FlyingJ 0]

I had been interested for years. I lived in NYC and thought often of finding a way to get up to the Ranch. I got pissed at my cousin (who owned a car) when I found out after the fact he had gone up there several times to do tandems.

Fast forward a couple years...I got stalled in Atlanta after leaving NYC to take an AmeriCorps position in Florida. I was totally broke and staying with my parents. That summer I had gotten my dad to go whitewater rafting for the first time and I was working on getting him to go skydive. He wanted nothing to do with it.

He had an obscenely rough week at work and called me on his drive home from out of town to say "this week has sucked...do you still want to go jump out of a plane?" I made the reservation that night for the next day and we along with my brother and a friend all went out to ASC outside Atlanta. I now know we got taken for a bit of a ride with charges for going up in the big plane, etc., but that aside we had some great tandem and video guys and I had a feeling before even jumping that I wanted to do this.

We all made the jump and I was hooked. I was unemployed and had no insurance, so the next Monday I took the best paying temp job I could find, bought a health insurance policy and started AFF at The Farm. It just so happened that my first weekend at the Farm was a Rodriguez Brothers boogie and I was hooked not only on jumping but on the DZ scene as well.

I spent every weekend for the next 6 months. On the last jump that I had cash to pay for I severely sprained my ankle on an out landing. It sucked, but it kept me from handing over the credit card which I was (stupidly) ready to do at the time. Shortly thereafter I moved to Florida for an AmeriCorps position with a stipend that made my temp job look like I was a millionaire so jumping regularly was out of the question.

I made a random jump here and there, traveling up to the Dublin boogie a couple years and the Destin beach jumps, etc. but the last jump I made was in 2006. I have by no means given up on getting back into it, but at the moment my free time and money are going into my fishing boat as I make the most of living on the coast.

Killing threads since 2004.

[wmw999 2,116]

I really always did want to start jumping. I remember reading an article about a kid who had died skydiving at 12, my age at the time.

So, of course, that piqued my interest.

I can remember telling a friend when I was 15 that I wanted to skydive; he had mentioned that he thought it was dumb because it wrecked your knees. So, of course, that made me want to do it even more.

At 18 I saw a "learn to skydive" ad in the college paper, but my parents oddly wouldn't front me the $30 that the class cost. The next year my brother made his one jump, but I was busy with school and stuff.

So at the end of a gap year in school, when I was 20, I climbed partway up a radio tower (I climbed down when my hands were tired, and I realized I still had down to go). I decided that I needed a better outlet for my adrenaline, and looked for the longest skydiving class I could find -- I figured that would be better instruction. I found one that was 6 weeks long -- I learned to pack, and did hundreds of PLF's.

My mother came along for my first jump; she said that if I was going to die, she wanted to be there. Made my jump, and was offered the choice between a logbook and a first jump certificate. I took the logbook.

Wendy P.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)