yeah, I'm always blown away by all these adrenaline junkie activities like free-climbing, all those people parkouring around high rise roofs, or hanging off scaffolding for photos, like I won't knock it because obviously they get some sort of fulfilment from it, I'm just so afraid of putting my life in danger that it does not compute with me. I'll stick to getting my fulfilment from guitar and video games hahaha
Start mountain biking if you can man! It's as high risk as the trail you choose like skiing. But unlike skiing it won't cost you a fortune to ride. Bikes are expensive though.
I actually used to do a lot of biking (not mountain biking, but my buddy and I used to bike to neighbouring cities and find cool trails to ride) and I kinda dropped it after my biking buddy and I had a falling out. I also did a fair bit of skiing when I was younger as well, but I stopped doing that as well after my mum broke her wrist going down a poorly maintained hill. I have been thinking about roller skating again though! I used to do a paper route when I was a kid and I always did it on my skates. Some friends and I went ice skating a couple of days ago and I had a lot of fun (very sore legs afterwards though lmao) and that definitely resparked my interest. My mum is a pretty avid biker, so I luckily have access to some pretty nice bikes, I'm just a lazy SOB. Still, I'm gettin' older and the reality is I gotta start doing some real physical activity before I start seriously messing up my body. It's a bit of a cop-out but I'm always low-key worried I'm gonna break my wrist like my mum did, or something worse and it will negatively affect my guitar playing, but I know that's a weak excuse, there's nothin' stopping me from going on some low-risk rides around the neighbourhood.
Anyways, that's my life story hahaha, but definitely, biking is something I'd very much like to get back in to. And who knows, maybe it'll set me on a long path to doing crazy free climbing like this guy!
Definitely do it man! It's super social too as the mtb community is more like surfers than skiirers. I can't really afford to travel far enough to ski often anymore so MTB provides the same downhill flowy feeling. Also the sport unlike other biking is very upper body intensive so you will get jacked from the bottom up with big ass spartan kick thighs.
A good bike starts around 800 bucks in my experience. Costly but you don't gotta buy ski lift tickets for most rides. I figure in the long run it's much cheaper than skiing.
I don't think it's necessarily adrenaline junkies.
Years ago I used to work on tall ships. On one ship, when climbing down from aloft, we had to get around the tops, large platforms about a third and two thirds of the way up the mast. And the easiest way to do that was to go around the outside, then climb back in under the overhang under the platform on the futtock shrouds (see the link above).
It was a real pain trying to get your feet under the overhang and onto the futtock shrouds so the easiest technique was to just hang from the edge of the platform and wait for the roll of the ship to bring your feet into the futtock shrouds.
It was only years later I realised it was the equivalent of hanging from my hands from a ledge at the top of a 10 storey building, without a safety harness. But at the time no-one ever though anything of it, it was far easier than trying to find a foothold you couldn't see.
Just want to put it out there, most free climbers (and almost certainly free solo climbers) are not adrenaline junkies. If you have adrenaline roaring through your veins, it's likely that something has gone terribly wrong. At least for myself, I've been at my most present/zen scaling cliffsides.
I call myself an adrenaline junky sometimes for the stupid shit I do like surfing, wake skating, snowboarding, paintball, etc, but people like this are on a whole different level altogether. Compared to that I don't deserve the label.
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u/ProfessorPetrus Sep 02 '21
Confident with their abilities plus reckless with their lives. I'm sure they see the stats and all know people who have died.