Have you learned/ started anything new recently?

I’ve been wingsuiting since 2007, and at that time we were all mainly focused on surviving, especially in the BASE environment flying off cliffs. Skydiving was simply a tool to learn how to fly a wingsuit well enough to survive BASE jumping. When Mario died in 2013, wingsuiting carried a lot of heaviness for me, even when I started flying again. Around that time, people were starting to do acrobatic flying in skydiving, flipping on their backs, flying upside down, and doing tricks. I’d always been able to do simple barrel rolls and front flips in a wingsuit before then. But now I discovered I simply wasn’t able to do any form of flying that felt unstable. Any time I tried to flip on my back, I was somehow instantly back in a rock solid, stable flying position again—it was like I actually blacked out and didn’t even know how I got there. My brain wouldn’t allow my body to get into any position that felt unsafe. I tried harder and harder, and it got more and more impossible. It was kind of a good problem for the BASE environment, because no matter what happened, I could never be unstable in my wingsuit for more than a fraction of a second. But skydiving started to get incredibly frustrating instead of fun, especially as all around me everyone was now acroflying their wingsuits. It was starting to hurt my ego too, and destroy my self confidence. And that started to carry over to how I felt when I was doing things that had nothing to do with skydiving or wingsuiting. Eventually I decided to do whatever it took to learn to fly on my back. In 2018, I traveled to the new indoor wingsuit tunnel in Sweden with the single goal of getting on my back, and I did get upside down on my last day there ….and then when we got back home Ian had a paragliding accident and crushed his feet, and life changed completely for both of us. Skydiving, and everything else, got placed on the backburner as we worked through his recovery. Ian got back to flying in 2022, and we both fully returned to skydiving and wingsuit BASE. At this point it had somehow become years of not breaking through to acroflying for me, with seemed to me like a pretty good amount of effort and a lot of mental energy. I was starting to think that for me, it might be impossible. The mindf*@k had become enormous.

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