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I'm a climber who has been skydiving once. I understand the appeal of an adrenaline sport, but I also understand that you get used to any adrenaline rush quick enough.
In climbing, I like the aspect of staying composed under pressure. You quest into the unknown, and must solve whatever problem is presented to you, whether it is techy footwork or tricky gear or puzzling ropework or committing to a pumpy runout.
When I went skydiving, I felt the rush of adrenaline. But I didn't really see anywhere to go from there. You jump, fall, deploy the chute, land. I felt like if I picked it up as a hobby, I would get bored pretty quickly. Unless I got into something like paragliding or wingsuiting, where you are actually able to explore and interact with the landscape.
So what keeps you interested after the adrenaline is gone? What's the progression?
I have 4500 jumps over about 13 years in the sport. My interest was in competition, which is weird as I'm not really a competitive person normally. I joined a recreational 4 way team and just fell in love with it. That lead me and some friends founding a 4-way/ 8-way competition team and we competed in Open against the likes as Arizona Airspeed, Team Fasttrax, and The Golden Knights. We were normally competitive with them, but it's hard to match teams paid to be there. I actually trained with Team Fasttrax for a short time as John Hart got his start at my home DZ.
That experience parlayed into doing Demos. Part of my competition team started doing Demos at just about every place you can imagine. I did have my PRO license for a few years to be able to get insurance. The highlight of that was doing a Demo at an airshow where Gen Paul Tibbets was doing a presentation on World War II. He came up to me and one of my team mates to ask us about skydiving. It was a surreal experience. He had a lot of interest in what we did during the show. Definitely one of those memories that will live with me forever.
What ended it all was internal team politics. My competition team was intertwined with the Demo team, so when barely held together relationships finally came crashing down on one, it brought down the other. By that time I was around 4000 jumps. There were a lot of hard feelings all around and I made the decision to pull back completely. Going back to just fun jumping just did not keep my interest. I took on students, but I always worked as a coach for jumpers just off student status... But again seeing my team just blow up like that really took its toll and I just grew disinterested. It didn't help that I was in my early 30's and my lifestyle pretty much precluded any type of long term relationship. Women think hanging out at the DZ to be pretty cool the first few times. However, every weekend with good weather and some with not so good weather just hanging out all day gets dull really fast.
So landing after a fun jump and gathering my chute I looked around hard at the landing zone and just felt... Nothing. I was bored and not interested in trying to create another team. That was October of 2003 and in March of 2004 I met the future Mrs. CanopyFlyer for the first time. I did around 400 jumps the 2003 season, 2004 I did 20 and sold my gear in 2005 to help pay for the wedding and put a down payment on a house. My last jump was the summer of 2006 on student gear of all things and it was the only jump I made in 2006. Skydiving was my chrysalis going from who I was to who I am now. I look back on those years with fondness and often talk about the lessons I learned during that time. However, I never went back and never plan to. Actually now age and age related injuries have made going back nearly impossible anyway. Which I'm OK with, I would not be who I am today and married to the woman I am without those years spent in the sky.
Today my wife and I have two boys and it's satisfying watching them grow and start doing those things that I wanted to do at that age.