Chapter One: The Nature of Extreme Sports and Their Champions "Without adventure, civilization is in full decay."
-- Alfred North Whitehead, philosopher
"Some people have 'hang out' genes and others have 'do stuff' genes."
-- T. J. Lavin, freestyle biker
Fame and wealth belong to great quarterbacks, center forwards, and home run hitters. Society prizes them like the Romans cheered gladiators who crushed their opponent's skull. They're heroes because they win.
Extreme athletes are heroes because they try -- something harder, faster, longer. Anyone can benefit from their insights and relate to them as people. Their goal is often not a score or a medal. In some sports, those widely acknowledged as the greatest never even compete. Money doesn't lure them to the edge, either; multimillion-dollar contracts do not yet beckon most extreme athletes. The prize they want is the full-bodied thrill of accomplishment and the lessons they offer you are how to achieve it.
What Do You Have in Common with Extreme Athletes?
The hunger to be really good at something runs through all of us. It's normal to crave the satisfaction and sense of self-worth that come from success. No one would question the sanity of wanting to perform well consistently and be cool under pressure. All of these urges are key catalysts for extreme athletes as well as people who don't venture near the edge.
There is also something we'd all like to have in common with extreme athletes. The best have developed and discovered techniques that repeatedly deliver the desired results in the face of uncommon challenges. Chances are very good that their tips on mental focus and physical fitness will boost your abilities even if planting a flag on Everest's summit or rotating 900 degrees on a skateboard are not in your plans. They will help you be a little bit more amazing.
A lot of times, extreme athletes inspire us by merely surviving, and sometimes it looks like they must have magical powers to do that. They don't. They know how to run through their options consciously and consistently. That's the first lesson.
A Glimpse at Living on the Edge
Extreme athletes have to develop the skill of effectively evaluating their options because they have a different way of looking at the world. Where other people see only danger, they also see fun. They look for risk in life. People who have this point of view, but don't have contingencies in mind when the unexpected happens, don't last long. For the athletes who do, it's perfectly reasonable to defy conventional wisdom about where and how to have a good time.
The Tsunami Rangers have been doing it since 1984. They paddle at places like Pigeon Point, which juts into the ocean fifty miles south of San Francisco. At the tip is a 115-foot-tall lighthouse built in the days of wooden ships to warn mariners of dangers like rock reefs, which are at or below water level depending on the tide. The hazards those sailors tried to avoid are a playground for the Rangers, a tribe of extreme sea kayakers with Kevlar-armored boats.
Just because they've been paddling in isolated surf zones, complex rock gardens, and dark sea caves for years, however, doesn't mean the risk is gone. Of all the environments where extreme athletes play, the sea offers the most surprises. Chaos is the norm. What the years have given the Tsunami Rangers is not less risk, but rather more practice thinking through options when the unexpected does happen -- like the spring afternoon when a large, breaking wave came around the corner at Pigeon Point and confronted Ranger Eric Soares.
I was inside the corner, unaware of the size of the wave. It was about fifteen feet high. I knew there was no way I could get away from it. Normally, if you think you're going to hit something, you bail out and swim like a seal. This time, I was trapped.
The day before the incident, Eric and Jim Kakuk, cofounders of the Tsunami Rangers, had speculated about what to do if they knew that a wave would slam them against the rocks. Jim's river kayaking background told him to lean toward the obstacle to avoid being pinned against it. He reconsidered. No, he concluded, the ocean withdraws after the wave so you won't get pinned. The greater danger is having your body smashed into the cliff. Lean into the wave; go hull-first into the rocks.
"Hull-first, hull-first." That's all I thought. I had to use my boat as a pad. As the wave hit me, I leaned into it doing a low brace. I had on a helmet and wetsuit, but no gloves. Wish I'd had gloves. I leaned into the wave to try and use it as a cushion. Then I hit the reef -- bam, bam, bam, I started bouncing on it. It was like a road with rocks in it. As I was bouncing, I was relaxing -- conserving my energy so I had everything I needed when I hit the cliff. I looked at my paddle blade and saw it break off. I was riding on the shaft. It was scraping along and grinding on the reef and getting closer and closer to my hand. I was hoping it wouldn't wear away completely because my hand would be next. I knew I'd have to use my hand if it came to that to protect my torso. The cliff was right in front of me. I took a breath: "Hull-first." I didn't know there was a drop-off at the end.
Suddenly, I was flying in the air, headed downward, hull-first. You don't want to be in the air with a boat. You want to be in the water. My hull took the beating. It died for me. I'd named my boat Elendil. I thought, what a fortuitous name.
Luckily, what hit me was a rogue wave. The rest of the waves that came in after that were not nearly as big so I was able to swim the battered boat away from danger.
If you're prepared for your adventure, the answer you need in a crisis will come.
Keen self-awareness and intelligence give extreme athletes a distinct advantage in averting serious injury or death. Add to that the progress made recently in equipment, conditioning programs, and our knowledge base, and most people would probably agree that extreme sports -- activities in which failure of mind, body, or gear can have devastating consequences -- are not necessarily the domain of wild-eyed asylum escapees.
What Is the Nature of Extreme Sports?
Extreme sports are competitive as well as noncompetitive adventures, such as high-altitude mountaineering. Stunts are just part of the backdrop; some of the athletes featured in this book do scary maneuvers for movies, but these experiences are not the focus of their lives as athletes. As a corollary, doing something outrageous once and walking away does not make a person a great extreme athlete or a credible source of advice.
Some of the competitive sports like bicycle stunt riding and aggressive in-line street skating were not spectator-ready until ESPN's X Games and NBC's Gravity Games, for example, imposed a structure that worked on television and offered a running color commentary. These sports had a history of camaraderie and contests, but not high-profile competitions, when ESPN brought them to TV audiences in 1995. Prior to that, the challenge for the uninitiated public was that the athletes' objectives were not intuitively obvious. (Even those who can't explain what happens between the commercials during a football game know the ball should cross the line.)
Competitive freestyle events are not institutionalized, rule-bound sports, so it follows that their nature is to deviate from the expected. In skysurfing, competitors try to spin upside down. Rodeo kayakers want to get stuck in suckholes. Freestyle bikers must get off the saddle to do tricks.
Increasingly, the best introduction to extreme sports, as well as the most intense coverage for fans, is on the Internet. Web sites offer real-time details in multimedia and links to explanations so viewers can log on anytime to feel the challenge, grasp the objectives, know the players, and learn the vocabulary. For example, www.quokka.com's coverage of the grueling and successful first attempt by Mark Synnott, Jared Ogden, and Alex Lowe to free-climb the Northwest Face of Great Trango Tower in Pakistan in July 1999 featured daily voice mails from the climbers, detailed maps, time-lapse photographs, and much more.
Extreme sports can be categorized in a number of ways, none of which perfectly introduces them. First, they could be discussed in terms of the gear they require; most depend on boards, wheels, ropes, or boats. Not all of them do, though. In some cases, like the Marathon des Sables, a 150-mile race across the Moroccan desert, the main elements are the athlete and the environment.
Classifying the sports according to where they occur -- snow, ice, rock, raging water, air, skate parks -- has value because it implies the strong connection that the athletes have with their chosen venue. On the other hand, it glides past the fact that many sports, by their nature, combine environments.
Finally, extreme sports can be discussed in terms of the main requirement of the activity, that is, what physical limits the athletes must stretch -- speed, balance, timing, and endurance. Using this approach accents what very different extreme sports, and the athletes who do them, have in common. It also lays the foundation for discussions of cross training and reveals why some extreme athletes are superior performers in seemingly unrelated activities.
Speed In these events, the object is to be the first to finish. Style, smiles, and outfits don't matter. Picabo Street, Olympic gold medal skier:
It's the clock from start to finish line. No foul points. Fastest one to the bottom wins. Going eighty miles an hour, you don't have time to care about whether someone dug the way you made that turn.
Speed skiing, mountain bike racing, and many other competitive speed events are extreme because they combine the need to go fast with unforgiving terrain. In ESPN's Winter X Games, the danger of speed on whoop-dee-...
