December 3rd, 2010 | 4 comments | Skydiving

Today’s prompt: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year.

There was nothing out of the ordinary on July 3rd. Every jump had been awesome, and I was gearing up for my fourth skydive of the day. I was jumping with my coach, Matt, as I had recently graduated AFF and was completing the remainder of the jumps necessary to earn my A License.

We were working on altitude awareness, adjusting my levels, and some other basic skydiving maneuvers.

It was a gorgeous day. The corn was starting to get really tall, the soybeans were growing in really thick and the smell of freshly cut grass on the runway was intoxicating. Freshly cut grass + the smell of a canopy + the smell of Jet A = the most incredible smell on the planet. I imagine my version of heaven will smell like a dropzone.

That skydive changed my life.

I had a parachute malfunction (post all about it here) and I knew exactly how to handle it and I survived. When I felt most alive was the ride under my reserve canopy during which I said “holy shit” over and over and over and took a cajillion deep breaths.

It’s hard to describe how it feels to skydive. If you’ve jumped, you get it. It’s even harder to describe what it feels like to have a perfectly good skydive, then have it go wrong, then land safely. It’s insane. There aren’t words vivid enough to translate what adrenaline like that feels like.

If something else had happened, I might not be here to reflect on July 3. But it didn’t. Everything worked out. I lived.

I was trained by professionals. I saved my own life. Twice.

The video is below.

At 1:10 you can see me start to spin. At 1:15 you hear Matt, my instructor, yell “CHOP IT” because he sees that I have a malfunction. The remainder of the video is Matt landing out so he can grab my main canopy.

What moment did you feel most alive this year?

Tags: Reverb10