Extreme sports have been a passion of mine since I was a kid. I aspire for the crazy moments of pure joy and exhilaration of doing something truly awesome. “Truly awesome” is also wholly subjective keep in mind. I love the daily grind of getting better at a sport and doing something that seems entirely out of reach. Part of the art behind these types of sports is that you are risking your well being to some extent to do something great. A few of the extreme sports that I have experience in include, skateboarding, longboarding, wakeboarding, and a few others with little experience. If you aren’t familiar with tons of extreme sports here is a list. Today I’ll be going through some of these sports and why I have such a passion for them.
Skateboarding one of the extreme sports I know the best. As a kid, my brother and I were addicted to skateboarding. We went to the skatepark all the time, built our own 6ft quarter pipe, bought other ramps, and in general skated all the time. I can’t remember why fully but we both fell out of it for a long time. Only recently I tried to get back in the groove of skating and boy did it bring back memories. I suddenly felt like I never stopped. The pure excitement of doing indy grabs over a flybox (big box with lots of ramps going in different directions) consumed me. A challenge with skating though is that the other people involved aren’t always the most friendly or positive. However, there are the exceptional few that love to push the boundary of what one can achieve on a piece of wood, four wheels, and some bargains. These are the people that I try to converse with and be around when I’m skating. The downside to always trying to push the limit of what’s you can achieve is that you can get hurt bad, similar to other things in life. If you embark on a new business venture to break the usual, you can get burned. If you try to do something you’ve never done before when skating you can fall pretty bad and suffer some injuries. If these injuries scare you, I may recommend longboarding.
Longboarding produces the same exhilaration just in a different way. There are a couple of different styles of longboarding. There is general cruising which is probably the most popular. People pretty much just smooth ride along paths, roads, the shore, and also carve ( going back and forth quickly on your board). Next is downhill longboarding. This is where the danger factor emerges in longboarding and where people will get special boards w/ wheels specifically for high-speed downhill lines. The fastest downhill line recorded to date is almost 90 mph by Kyle Wester. Lastly, we have electric longboarding which is insanely invigorating. My brother builds his own electric longboard, and it holds up pretty well. It goes roughly 20 mph, and you can cruise, carve or fly along any road or path for the most part. These boards are mostly used for cruising and commonly transportation.
Wakeboarding is another animal. Once you have the basics down (standing up, getting outside the wake, carving, potentially buttering, etc.) you get into the challenging aspects of the sport. However, with great challenge comes great reward. The first time you jump the wake, it feels like pure bliss and enjoyment has overcome every part of you. Then every time you break your boundary of you can achieve you get a similar feeling. The level of happiness that you can derive from this sport is immense because the tricks you can potentially pull never stop. After I got the hang of jumping the wake, I moved onto indy grabs/board grabs while jumping the wake which makes you feel incredible again. This can go on, and the super experienced wakeboarders will try new tricks while doing backflips and a myriad of different things. However, like the other extreme sports, this too has its danger zones. If you land wrong, lean forward too much, or execute something incorrectly the result is often a faceplant with your eyelids being flipped inside out while your body writhes with pain. Hopefully, this doesn’t happen too often. However, counterintuitively, the falls that look very painful often aren’t so, but the falls that look flat and like a flop generally are. This is just my insight into wakeboarding though.
I am interested in trying more of these types of sports. The others that I have a little experience in include bouldering, rock climbing, mountain biking, kneeboarding, skiing, cliff jumping, slacklining, extreme hiking, white water rafting, and canoeing (I’m not sure if this one counts). In particular, I have had tons of fun mountain biking and cliff jumping. Although what I have regularly experience in the past has been heaps of fun, I’d like to venture out and participate in more rock climbing, cliff jumping, and mountaineering. I’d also really want to try snowboarding, skydiving, base jumping/ wingsuit gliding, surfing, scuba diving, drifting, and racing high-end cars. Some of these are a little out of reach, but it doesn’t hurt to dream in the present a bit. If this was informative or you have your own experience with extreme sports reach out to me and let me know!