ABOUT SKYDIVING

Most people have no idea what skydiving is about. I had the opportunity to test it last summer, and since that moment, I think that more people would give it a try if they knew how it feels when you fall from a plane 4000 meters from the soil.

I don’t think there’s anyone in this world who’s not afraid of jumping out of a well-functioning plane. That was the first thing we were told before we made our first jump. And that’s true. One would say we were just stupidly attracted by extremely dangerous situations, and I have to admit that that was quite true: we needed adrenaline, at least at the beginning.

You could think the feeling you have during the fall is like jumping into a swimming pool from 5 meters, or like big attractions in theme parks. But skydiving is actually not like that.

Apart from the fact that you are completely terrorized the moment you are told to leave the reassuring ground of the plane, you feel for a moment as if your stomach had decided to move from its initial place. But after a few seconds (you are then falling at a speed of 200 km/h), it’s just as if you were just floating on the air. That is the strangest situation I’ve ever been in: I didn’t even notice I was falling. I was so high that the soil didn’t seem to be approaching. I had no reference point I could fix my attention on, in order to recognize the world I’ve been living in for 20 years. Luckily I could focus on the women falling just in front of me, trying to make me feel at ease. But I can tell you I didn’t feel at ease at all: no ground, 200 km/h of wind in the face, so much wind that it is even difficult to breathe, an incredible noise …

But after a few jumps, I got accustomed to this. We all succeeded in understanding how to move in the air (that’s quite difficult actually). And then I started looking around me, watching the landscape, the mountains far away. Some days there were even small clouds. It is such an impressive experience to cross those clouds (which look unreachable from the ground) at such a high speed.

The next step for us will be to jump with other people: that must be fantastic to experience skydiving all together.