Splat! That’s the sound BASE jumper Jeb Corliss promises you won’t hear when he attempts to land a several-thousand-foot free fall without a parachute. The 31-year-old Californian and former host of the Discovery Channel’s Stunt Junkies has been developing an intricate touchdown procedure. He now claims he’s less than six months (and a $2 million TV deal) away from making the drop in—where else?—Las Vegas. “It’s the equivalent of summiting Everest for the first time,” says Corliss. “Imagine doing that in front of a crowd of 500,000.” Key to his strategy are a wing suit (increasingly popular among BASE jumpers as they evolve toward gliding down mountainsides) and a customized runway.
For those who have been to the Grand Canyon you’ll quickly realize that IMAX is not big enough (despite it’s 6-story high screen) to capture the awe one experiences when standing on the rim. Don’t get me wrong…the film is amazing and definitely worth seeing. The footage shot while running the rapids is quite exhilarating, and made us want to return to the Canyon. The soundtrack was amazing too!
Combined with a timely message of conservation and sustainability, the movie addresses the ongoing drought affecting the Colorado River and how we are collectively contributing to the problem. Suggestions on what we can do individually along with intimations on what needs to happen politically are woven into the presentation. If you’re able to see the 3-D flick, let us know what you took away from it.
Your odds of outrunning the snow? Not so good. An avalanche can accelerate to 80 mph in seconds. But if you follow these tips, you might just limp away from it or get carried on a stretcher to the ER.
Ski one at a time. Ski between islands of safety. Make sure somebody is watching your entire descent. Shout to warn others. Ditch your poles. Keep your pack on. Insert AvaLung mouthpiece. Pull the ABS ripcord.
1. Grab a tree. The more snow that slides past you, the less likely you’ll be buried alive. Hang on for dear life until the force knocks you off.
2. Do Not Swim. Research has shown that swimming does not increase odds of survival and it’s better to protect yourself and conserve energy.
3. Create space. Once the snow stops, it’ll set like concrete. As it slows, exhale to clear the snow that is packed in your mouth.
4. Raise a hand. Before the flow ceases, get a limb to the surface to help rescuers find you. Between 15 minutes and 45 minutes under the snow, your odds of survival fall from 90 percent to 30.
5. Breathe slowly. To delay an impermeable ice mask forming around your face, stay calm and don’t bother yelling until rescuers are on top of you. Your fate is now in their hands. Pray that your beacon is working. Pray that their beacon is working. Pray that they have practiced using their beacon. Pray that they have a shovel that won’t break. Pray that they have practiced the latest shoveling techniques. Pray that there is no major trauma. Be thankful you had the insight to outfit yourself with coverage from iMULTISPORT
RALEIGH, N.C. — Like a lot of triathletes, Deanna Babcock is starting to train for the 2008 season. She’s swimming a couple of days a week at the YMCA, and she’s gradually upping the miles on the bike. Soon, she plans to start running. Her goal is to be ready, by June 1, for the Kerr Lake Triathlon, a 1,500-meter swim, 40-kilometer bike ride and 10k run. By November, she plans to do the Beach 2 Battleship Half-Ironman in Wilmington, N.C., which will involve swimming 1.2 miles, biking 56 miles and running 13.1 miles.
First, though, she needs to break in a new piece of equipment.
Her left leg.
“There’s a lot to learn,” says Babcock, a 23-year-old grad student at N.C. State whose plan to do Ironman Florida this past November got derailed the afternoon of July 20 when a routine workout cost her her left leg and nearly her life. “That’s OK. There’s a lot of people out there willing to help you. It’s not like Sarah Reinertsen is out to keep her trade secrets.”
Sarah Reinertsen, for those of you outside the triathlon community, is the reason you shouldn’t scoff at Babcock’s plan to do a half Ironman. In 2005, Reinertsen became the first female with an above-the-knee amputation to finish the Hawaii Ironman, generally regarded as the toughest Ironman going.
Run an Ironman on just one leg? In Babcock’s opinion, it’s just a matter of figuring out the new hardware. The rest — the open water swims at Jordan Lake, the hours of pedaling the back roads of North Carolina’s Wake and Chatham counties, the long training runs through town — that’s a matter of doing what every other triathlete has to do: getting yourself physically and mentally prepped for the challenge ahead.
“It’s pretty sweet to put your body to the limits of what it can do,” Babcock says. “I kinda inadvertently did that this summer.”
When everything changed
By “this summer,” Babcock means July 20.
Her recollection of the day is fuzzy. She remembers rising early and heading to her 10-foot by 30-foot research plot along Davis Drive. For her graduate thesis in soil sciences, she’s testing various materials that may help minimize erosion. She spent the day working in the sun — the temperature peaked that day at 88 degrees — before knocking off about 3 to get in a swim at N.C. State.
The swim was important. Nine months earlier, Babcock, who had run cross-country as an undergrad at Albion College in Michigan, was watching the Ironman world championships in Kona, Hawaii. That looks like fun, she thought. She’d done a couple of sprint triathlons over the summer and performed well, winning her age category in both; an Ironman would just be more — a lot more — of the same. She joined the N.C. State Triathlon Club, picked an Ironman a year out — Ironman Florida, on Nov. 4, 2007 — and started training. That training had included the Myrtle Beach Marathon in February (time: 4 hours, 1 minute), the collegiate nationals triathlon in mid-April and the White Lake Triathlon, an Olympic distance race (just under a mile in the water, 24.8 miles on the bike, a 6.2-mile run) in May. Her next big test was the Duke Half Marathon in September. She needed to swim.
Babcock has to rely on the recollections of others for an account of what happened after she rode her bike to the pool. At some point in her swim her heart stopped. N.C. State lifeguards pulled her from the water and began CPR. Wake County EMS arrived and had to use a defibrillator three times to revive her. No one can say for sure how long her heart was stopped. One estimate puts it as long as seven minutes. “It certainly was at least a few minutes,” says Dr. Marc Silver, her cardiologist.
Certainly, he adds, long enough to do some serious damage.
Bad to worse quickly
When she arrived at WakeMed, it was feared that Babcock had an enlarged heart, a thickening of the heart muscle. Silver says the condition is more common than generally thought; it only becomes apparent when the heart undergoes an intense workout. When that happens, the heart practically explodes and the situation is almost always fatal. About 125 athletes younger than 35 die each year from an enlarged heart; among the more prominent recently was 28-year-old marathoner Ryan Shay, who died five miles into an Olympics qualifying event last fall in New York.
An echocardiogram ruled out an enlarged heart in Babcock’s case. A diagnosis would have to wait until other life-threatening problems could be addressed.
When the heart stops pumping and cells stop getting blood, bad things happen quickly. The immediate concern is brain damage. Brain cells start dying after three to four minutes without oxygen. After the brain, the heart and kidneys start to go. With Babcock’s heart down for perhaps as long as seven minutes, there was plenty of cause for concern.
That concern immediately focused on her kidneys. The blood-deprived muscle tissue in her legs began leaking an enzyme damaging to the kidneys. Both failed. She went on dialysis.
Then there were her legs. The muscles in her left leg were especially bad, the lack of coursing blood causing the veins to collapse. Doctors cut the muscle fascia — the thin layer of tissue encasing all muscle — to re-stimulate circulation. Her right leg stabilized; her left worsened. The next day it was amputated about mid-thigh.
She developed pneumonia and was in an induced coma — to keep her still for healing purposes — for four weeks.
During that time, though, surprisingly positive signs began to emerge. Her kidneys regained full function, there was no evidence of brain damage, and her right leg began to improve.
“She is incredibly lucky to be alive,” Silver says. “She’s a miracle child.”
An aggressive treatment
Babcock is quick to second that “incredibly lucky to be alive” observation. Asked Monday how long it had been since the incident, she replied, “My six-month anniversary of not dying was two days ago. We went out and celebrated with refined sugar.”
She’s quick to second the “miracle” thing as well. The miracle is the technology that saved her life and promises to get it close to where it was before July 20.
Miracle One: The reason Babcock survived as long as she did without a heartbeat is a procedure called induced hypothermia, being used with increased aggressiveness by WakeMed. Induced hypothermia involves dropping body temperature through ice packs and an injection of an icy saline solution via a catheter into balloons placed under the skin.
“The target temperature is 91.4 degrees,” says Eric Reyer, a nurse with WakeMed who’s involved in the hospital’s induced hypothermia program. Cells in a chilled body require significantly less oxygen to survive and thus prevent damage from spreading. The procedure has been in use for several years, but gained widespread attention last fall when Buffalo Bills tight end Kevin Everett suffered a severe blow to his spinal column, the type of injury that often results in paralysis. Doctors credit induced hypothermia with the fact that three months later he exhibits few signs of his injury.
Miracle Two: Silver still isn’t sure what caused Babcock’s heart to stop, but the current thinking is that it was caused by an enlarged right ventricle, something a person is born with. If the ventricle has improved on her next checkup, then Silver will scratch that diagnosis — a genetic condition can’t “improve” — and look elsewhere. Regardless, Babcock will keep the implantable cardiac defibrillator inserted under her left collarbone. It’s a tiny, battery-operated device that, should Babcock’s heart stop again, will deliver an electric jolt to jump-start it.
Miracles One and Two were lifesaving. Miracle Three has more to do with saving Babcock’s spirit.
Deanna Babcock’s goal is to be ready, by June 1, for the Kerr Lake Triathlon, a 1,500-meter swim, 40-kilometer bike ride and 10k run. By November, she plans to do the Beach 2 Battleship Half-Ironman in Wilmington, N.C. — we’ll be cheering her on. if you’d like to help her in her cause, then check out Dollars for Deanna
He had learned this extreme form of tightrope walking from a homeless man who wrote books on quantum physics. But that was years ago, while goofing around on a flexible piece of nylon webbing tied close to the ground between a tree and the bumper of a Chevy van.
This was something else entirely for Dean Potter, one of the world’s best climbers, barefoot in the dying sun last Friday, walking between ledges of a U-shaped rim above Hell Roaring Canyon, a 400-foot sheer sandstone wall on his right, a 900-foot drop to a dry riverbed on his left. No leash tethered him to the rope. Nothing attached him to earth but the grip of his size-14 feet and the confident belief that, if needed, his parachute would open quickly and cleanly and not slam him into the canyon wall.
At 6 feet 5 inches and 180 pounds, wirily strong, Potter dressed in jeans and blue T-shirt emblazoned with a hawk. He wore a wide headband over unruly hair, gaining the appearance of a less gaunt and reckless Keith Richards as Alpine daredevil. As Potter stepped onto the 180-foot rope — a strand of iridescent blue against desiccated canyon shades of brick and tan and coppery green — he was believed to be the first person to combine the adventure sports of highlining and BASE-jumping.
He was also taking another stride toward his longing for avian flight, not as a birdman in a nylon wing suit or squirrel suit, which he had tried, but as a soloist who could jump off a cliff in a way that he did not yet understand, with a strength and concentration that he did not yet possess, and simply fly. Trance music pulsed from speakers on the canyon ledge with knowing lyrics: “Sometimes I think my dreams are wild.”
Highlining was a high-wire version of slacklining, an extreme cousin of tightrope walking in which no pole was used for balance and the rope was elastic, allowing for various tricks involving walking, sitting, lying down, flipping, even spinning hula hoops. BASE-jumping was an acronym used to describe parachuting from objects like buildings, towers, bridges and cliffs.
Have you checked out what’s going on over at The Weather Channel? I must admit that other than when a hurricane was about to bear down on South Florida (when I was based there) or whilst channel surfing…there never was much need to watch TWC. That’s all changed since discovering Epic Conditions and it’s companion Epic Weather online.
“Epic is designed to showcase the power and importance of weather and its impact on outdoor activities,” said Tom Flournoy, VP of Advanced Media for The Weather Channel. “It also explores the positive side of weather and the joy that weather brings to people’s daily lives and personal passions.”
The Weather Channel airs Epic Conditions every Friday night @ 8pm and again Saturday night @ 9pm. You can also check out their library of features on their website.
Base jumping is probably the most dangerous sport in the world, determined medical doctor and mountaineer Erik Monasterio at ExWeb last year. Specializing in Forensic Psychiatry the doc said that a comprehensive data base of base jumping fatalities reveals that 175 jumpers have died since the sport began (approximately 30 years ago).
“The surprising finding is that only 123 of those deaths were directly related to base jumping, the other deaths were related to other accidents, drug overdoses and suicides,” said Monasterio.
The first BASE jump from Cerro Torre!
So where’s ExWeb’s favorite base jumper Valery Rozov now? Mountain.ru reports that Valery is neither hanging from a beam nor has vanished in Nirvana land. He is in Patagonia - ready to jump Cerro Torre - for the second time!
In 2004 Valery made a new route on Amin Brakk’s (5850m) west face in Pakistan, considered the most technically complex wall in the world - and then jumped down. In 2006, Rozov made the first BASE-jump from the Alps’ Grandes Jorasses, following a climb on one of the face’s hardest routes: The Croz Spur.
February 24 last year the Russian X-gamer base jumped off the 1400-m face of Torres del Paine in Patagonia.
And this week a message arrived from the climbers that Valery had jumped Cerro on Monday, 9 am local time. The point of jump was located a bit below the “Compressor” route traverse. The flight lasted 1 minute and 20 seconds with an altitude difference of about 1450 meters.
Valery said he opened a bit higher than planned, was caught by a gust and flew and and down for 15 minutes in the last 200 meters before finally and fortunately hitting ground.
Due to bad weather and falling ice the team didn’t reach the summit and will therefore make a second attempt during a forecasted weather window March 3-5, to see if conditions have improved and whether it would be possible to jump from the top.
“Otherwise, the previous point will become the only possible to make a jump on this route,” they report.
Steve Brown has released The Inner Triathlete, a collection of multi-sport articles, interviews and short stories that speak to the human side of the sport of triathlon and to the spirit of the triathlete. The pieces, previously published by the author over several years, have been brought together as a fund raising effort and dedication to the life and mission of Jon “Blazeman” Blais, the first patient with Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) to cross the finish line at the legendary Ironman Triathlon World Championship, in Hawaii.Blais won the hearts of millions through the story of his will to live life to the fullest despite the inevitable, nearing end. In May, 2007, he lost his battle with ALS, but Blais’ poetry writing and war against the disease is carried on through The Blazeman Foundation.
A portion of all book proceeds will benefit The Blazeman Foundation which raises money and awareness to find a cure for ALS. Although not a book about Blais’ life, the collection connects with the spirit of the multi-sport athlete, which was evident also in Blais’ writing. The book’s foreword is written by longtime triathlon writer Bob Mina.
Brown, of Philadelphia, has raced, worked and volunteered at hundreds of endurance sports events since 1987, from 5-km to marathon running to Ironman triathlon (2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, 26.2-mile run). Over the years, he’s also used his racing as a platform to raise funds and awareness for charitable causes. Brown is also a USA Triathlon Regional Board member and a coach with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s TEAM IN TRAINING triathlon group.
Married, and a father of twins, Brown also finds time to write for regional and national publications, typically on sport and the human condition. The Blais production is his second book. In Brown’s first, My New Race, he chronicled his journey from leukemia diagnosis to Ironman finish line.
Both books are available through Lulu Publishing, and both benefit the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
Founded in 2002, Lulu is the world’s fastest-growing print-on-demand marketplace for digital publishing needs. Visit Lulu.com or www.remissionman.com to preview and order Brown’s books.
Straight from the AP Newswire……NEW YORK (AP) — A New York City councilman is introducing a bill to ban people from jumping off buildings and bridges.
The daredevil practice is called BASE jumping. BASE stands for building, antenna, span and earth, the main objects from which people jump.
Two years ago BASE jumper Jeb Corliss was stopped by police while trying to leap from an Empire State Building observation deck. His lawyer says there’s no law in New York state against jumping off a building.
Councilman Peter Vallone (vuh-LONE’) Jr. says BASE jumping is dangerous for people on the ground. He says next week he’ll introduce legislation making it an A misdemeanor to use a parachute to jump from a structure higher than 25 feet.Vallone’s bill would subject a BASE jumper to up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.
Here’s Jeb recently on the Colbert Report talking about his next planned feat…
from Wired.com
couple of days a week at the YMCA, and she’s gradually upping the miles on the bike. Soon, she plans to start running. Her goal is to be ready, by June 1, for the Kerr Lake Triathlon, a 1,500-meter swim, 40-kilometer bike ride and 10k run. By November, she plans to do the Beach 2 Battleship Half-Ironman in Wilmington, N.C., which will involve swimming 1.2 miles, biking 56 miles and running 13.1 miles.
