Lessons from the Edge: Extreme Athletes Show You How to Take on High Risk and Succeed - Couverture souple

Karinch, Maryann

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0684862158 ISBN 13 : 9780684862156

Editeur : Touchstone, 2000

Synopsis

Book by Karinch Maryann

A propos du livre

Extrait :

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-doos (i.e., a tight sequence of jumps) and banked turns in the skiercross, boardercross, and bikercross events is amplified by the fact that competitors are six abreast at the start. Other speed sports are extreme because the rate and levels of acceleration create a hazardous condition. Top-fuel boat and car racing, stand-up skateboarding, and street luge fall into this category.

Balance and Timing In these events, well-timed moves and exquisite body control mean the difference between a joyride and an ambulance ride. This is what skydiving while standing on a board and soaring over hills on a pint-sized BMX stunt bike have in common. In both skysurfing and freestyle biking, even the most basic tricks demand keen mental and physical abilities.

The list of extreme sports with a core requirement to push the limits of balance and timing includes big-wave surfing, extreme skiing, skateboarding, freeflying, waterfall kayaking, and many others. In fact, many extreme sports fit on that list. Speed is a key element of risk in many of them -- in freeflying, the skydiver might be going 180 miles an hour, for example -- but it is an integral part of the activity rather than the objective, which is extraordinary control of the body and essential gear.

Endurance Endurance events like marathons require a huge dedication to physical training and, without a doubt, the will to put one foot in front of the other repeatedly. Extreme endurance sports require more from the athlete's psyche. The intensity lasts for so long that, at some point, these activities are primarily exercises in attitude, pain control, and tactical decision making. Depending on the challenge, super-fit bodies can go on and on for weeks or even months with just a little rest periodically. Succeeding in that challenge -- and in some cases, that means surviving -- can only happen if their minds and emotions are conditioned to support their bodies. In the words of Robert Nagle of the top adventure racing team, Eco-Internet:

A race like ours is usually seen by people as a physical test, but in fact, it's much more an internal -- that is, mental and emotional -- test. The races last for so long and are replete with so many strategic and tactical decisions. How you make those decisions determines how well you do.

Why Do People Do These Things?

The answers to two main questions shed light on how extreme activities emerge and develop: Why do people do these things? and: How can they do these things and not kill themselves?

Some athletes start doing these things when they're young because they want to be different or they want an adrenaline rush. Commonly, it's a combination of both reasons; they're impulses that a lot of teenagers probably share.

Daring to Be Different Kristen Ulmer, who made the first female descent of Grant Teton, rose to fame skiing off cliffs for movies while she was still in college. In those days, she did unusual stunts so she would be noticed:

When I first started, I just wanted to get attention by taking lots and lots of risks. Everyone was asking me if I was afraid of dying and I just got a kick out of it. I wasn't aware that I could get hurt...

The first stunt I ever did for the cameras, I had absolutely no experience catching air. I had caught maybe five feet of air and all of a sudden I'm catching a hundred feet of air forty feet high. I was totally out of control heading for a tree. I didn't actually black out; I just don't remember anything about it.

Kristen hit the base of the tree and got a bloody nose. She walked away a celebrity. At the time, she got what she wanted.

Arlo Eisenberg, a pioneer in the mid-1990s of so-called aggressive in-line skating, wanted to be different, too, but attention and risk were side effects rather than goals.

I didn't do things because they're dangerous. Being a young guy, you have a lot of energy and want some kind of athletic outlet. For me, and I think for a lot of people in our generation, football and baseball aren't the answer. For some reason, whatever factors went into it, there's an anti-establishment sentiment. We want to do things by our own rules, and we want to do things that are new and different that haven't been predetermined for us.

The Adrenaline Pump Most kids fulfill their need for a thrill by drag racing in their old Honda or experimenting with sex. Others, because of where they grow up or how their friends have fun, find themselves surfing big waves or skiing the backcountry. Chances are good that, if they feel competent enough that the thrill supersedes the fear, they go out for the rush repeatedly.

Getting an adrenaline rush is certainly one reason why athletes continue to go to extremes year after year. Does that mean they have an "adrenaline addiction"? Maybe some do, but it would be inaccurate to say that most of the adventurers, record holders, pioneers, and gold medalists in this book have an uncontrollable hunger for danger, a base desire for bad odds -- that they're junkies, as in, "They can't stop themselves. They have an adrenaline addiction."

The Competence Rush The professional athlete's love of an adrenaline spike should almost never be linked to compulsive behavior or being out of control. Quite the opposite is true. It's more appropriate to say that taking a risk and succeeding because of their wits and skill feels orgasmic. As stunt biker T. J. Lavin says, "I'm more likely to get an adrenaline rush from something that gives me satisfaction than from something that makes me scared. When I know I'm going to nail a trick, and there is no fear, it's the greatest rush."
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Présentation de l'éditeur :

You've watched skiers race down the most dangerous of slopes with incredible grace and speed. With a mixture of pure disbelief and fascination, you've seen extreme skateboarders soar through the air with just enough balance and timing to keep their edge. And you can't help but wonder, how do they do that?
Lessons from the Edge is an exciting exposé of the extreme experience, giving you the why and the how of what it means to live on the edge. Extreme athlete Maryann Karinch chronicles the close calls and peak performances of competitive athletes, and shows that being successful is about much more than winning. For extreme athletes, success means cultivating the inner strength, confidence, and discipline to be ready for the next challenge.
Both inspirational and practical, Lessons from the Edge is a how-to guide for tapping into your own potential for greatness.

• Learn how to develop mental toughness, trust intuition, and channel emotional energy in do-or-die situations
  
• Prepare for an athletic challenge with expert advice on nutrition, sport-specific training routines, personal gear and equipment, and dealing with injuries
  
• Discover what makes extreme athletes tick, from the bravado and thrill of adrenaline that come with success to the fear and self-doubt that can undermine performance
  

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Touchstone
• Date d'édition: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0684862158
• ISBN 13: 9780684862156
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 272