What is the absolute last extreme sport you'd be willing to try?
Personally I'd say cave diving. I was contemplating between that and free climbing soloing but I honestly rather fall to my death than drown in a claustrophobic, dark, cold, silted up cave.
Edd Sorenson has some fantastic cave rescue / body recovery stories incase anyone's interested. The dude is an absolute legend in the cave diving circles.
Cave diving is a good one. But also underwater cave diving, if that's the right term. Seeing pictures of those those "don't go beyond this point you will die" signs underwater is pretty dang spooky
I almost played Russian Roulette once, thankfully I was late to the game. The guys wanting to play didn't have a revolver, so they used a semi-automatic pistol. I really dodged a bullet with that one
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You get 2 anvils, stack them on top of each other, the bottom one upside down, pack some gunpowder between them, light it, run, and the top one shoots off into the air and eventually comes back down.
I'm sure it's a blast (literally) but I'm not trying to looney tunes myself.
Three years ago, I broke my leg free climbing. It took two and a half years of physical therapy to get back to maybe 80% of what it used to be, and now I have a permanent metal plate. I was lucky it wasn't any worse.
I don't think I'll ever free climb again, it's just not worth it. However, I also would never do cave diving.
I know you didn’t ask and probably don’t care, but free climbing and free soloing are different things. Free climbing uses a rope, but does not allow you to use artificial means to ascend, like pulling on gear you put on the wall. The gear is just there to arrest a fall.
Free soloing is where you climb without a rope. Free climbing uses a rope for safety, but upward mobility is hands and feet on wall. Aid climbing is where you climb by fixing gear to the wall and use it to ascend.
If you know what you’re doing, free climbing is pretty safe. Free soloing is not, but people do it successfully without their huge balls weighing them down.
As a side note, bouldering is also climbing without a rope, but you don’t climb high enough to make a fall fatal.
Thanks! Yeah I meant free soloing. I was under the illusion that 'Free Solo' was just the name of the Alex Honnold documentary and free climbing was the term for the sport itself, like free diving.
You're probably talking about proximity flying. I've done a bunch of wingsuit flying, in groups, from a plane. Skydiving but with wingsuits. With all of the correct training and gear, it felt completely safe.
I never BASE jumped, but when I was skydiving a lot I was considering giving it a go, but still leaning towards the 'nah that's probably a bit too dangerous for me' side.
Then there's base jumping with a wingsuit... Something that if I had gotten into base jumping, would still have probably been too scary.
Then, about 100x more dangerous and terrifying than all of that, is proximity flying - wingsuit base, with the intention of staying close to terrain the whole time. These psychos fly through valleys, between trees etc...
Knowing what I do about how tricky it is to fly a low-performance, gentle easy wingsuit in a stable formation, the idea of flying these bigger, twitchier high performance wingsuits through a valley just seems suicidal. Absolutely nope.
Yeah thanks, I meant the proximity flying with a wingsuit where they fly very close to the terrain. I live close to a mountain where they are doing this. The videos are stunning but we hear about accidents regularly in local media. If something happens your done. No thx:
https://youtu.be/QKMkhCsgsas
Honestly, I don't know what's supposed to be fun about cave diving. Like, normal diving doesn't push your buttons any more so the next logical step is to go diving in a grave?
Extremely risky even for the very experienced. You only need one thing to go wrong and that's it. Sometimes even the best planning can result in your death because something entirely out of your control happens.
I've done a little bit of cave diving. There are caves I would dive again, and some I absolutely would not. These experiences rank very highly among the coolest of my life. There's things to see down there you can't experience any other way. But yes, it is relatively dangerous and I spent a lot of time down there not thinking about how far away I was from the surface.
I did it one time with a pelvis area harness instead of the feet-hanger shit so I didn't go upside down. It was like a carnival bungee jump thing that was about 80 feet high, cost $25 to do. It was scary as shit for the moment of falling but once the bouncing started it was pretty dang fun.
I did the reverse bungee jumping where they shoot you up like a slingshot (in a cage). I shit you not, 2 weeks later the cord snapped. Cant recall how bad the people got hurt or died but the place tore it down
Extreme ironing. I don't see the point of dragging a board and iron anywhere. Even at home I'd rather wear wrinkles than open that board. (which is why I buy perminant press church clothes)
The one I would also most like to do, if only it was safe and I wasn’t disabled: wingsuiting. Even if I wasn’t disabled I still wouldn’t do it, just because I don’t want to die by smashing into the ground at 60 mph. But moving through the sky like that sounds incredible.
I may be wrong here but I think that just like sky diving vs BASE jumping, you can actually just do it from a plane, which sounds like it would be a lot less dangerous
Free plummeting. Although that's just a fancy way to say "jumping off of something really high and then dying when you hit the ground." The problem is you can only do it once, but it will be the last extreme sport you will ever try.
What about it, for curiosity's sake? Is it the fumes? The crazyness of literally going so fast as to barely retain control in tons of metal? Or for things like motorbikes, doing all that without tons of metal for a modicum of protection? lol
I love motorsports, but no matter the power source, the extreme stuff kinda' takes having a screw or two loose...
I would gladly skydive; but strapping some dead trees to my feet and hurtling myself at high speed towards a bunch of live trees, as though taunting them, seems like a bad idea.
I did bungee jumping once and hated that. I can't imagine jumping higher and using a parachute. Fuck. That.
I like skateboarding and rollerblading, but only like watching BMX. Like I grew up doing half pipes and stuff with skateboards and blades and that's hard enough. Trying to do with a bike, I'd probably end up eating shit and fucking up my nads.
a lot of people saying cave diving and I agree it is fucking terrifying and you wouldn't catch me anywhere near it but you are weightless, if you go somewhere bad you can almost always just go back. Dry caving however has this little thing called gravity, you can get stuck in a hole with no way out, I would honestly rather drown.
I was watching something the other day where these guys went through this tiny little hole in the ground. It turned into a massive cavern hundreds of feet deep then they followed the cave as it narrowed, by the end of, he had taken off most of his gear and was straining to pull himself through crevices that he really didn't fit through. One slight mistake or a shift in some rocks and you're done. If the guy he was with was a little bit bigger and couldn't get through the crevice he couldn't even get in to save his ass. Yeah no thanks.
Underwater spelunking is significantly more dangerous because you have a very limited oxygen supply and it's very easy to get confused about which way is up. And every time you get near a surface you end up having zero visibility.
Everywhere you go your equipment's getting stuck on things.
To be honest either one of those can fuck right off, we don't even need a contest.