Extreme sports, why do we do them?

When you hear the word “extreme sport”, your mind probably immediately goes to those insane people jumping out of a plane without a parachute, someone sending a jump taller than your house on a dirt bike, someone climbing a skyscraper with no harness, but you don’t often stop and think about who is doing this and why.

Extreme sports hurt. A lot. Even when you don’t fail, and you have a perfectly good day, you still come home feeling sore, and that creakiness in your knee never really fades. So why do people voluntarily do this to themselves?

The answer is very simple and very complicated, all at once. The simple answer is, to feel. To feel the wind against your skin, to feel accomplished feeling after you finish a stunt, to have fun in ways most people are too scared to even think about, but it goes much, much deeper than that.

The main thing you’ll hear every extreme sports athlete talk about is the adrenaline. Adrenaline is an extremely powerful hormone and neurotransmitter (basically a drug to our body) that can make you forget and ignore everything else. Adrenaline used to be one of the keys to our survival.

The way adrenaline works, is it basically, in very simple terms, gives your body a boost of energy that you wouldn’t be able to access normally. When your brain senses you are in danger, it releases adrenaline, and all of a sudden you don’t feel that twisted ankle anymore, and you start full speed sprinting away from the bear chasing you.

Now, you don’t have to be being chased by a bear to feel adrenaline nowadays. Most people get it through, you guessed it, extreme sports. When you’re flying down a mountain at 60KPH, skipping rocks and avoiding trees, coming up on that huge 10m jump you’ve been hyping yourself up for, suddenly everything else fades. You aren’t sore anymore, you forget all about how your crush hasn’t texted you back in 4 days, and you just focus.

Adrenaline is so powerful, you’ll often see an athlete get up for a second or two after a huge crash, announce they’re ok and that they don’t feel any pain, before collapsing back onto the ground. That adrenaline rush makes them ignore their injuries for a bit, before the adrenaline wears off and your body realises “I may have pushed a liiiittle too hard this time.”

When you’re scaling a skyscraper with no safety equipment on, you stop hearing the noise of the crowd below, you stop thinking about what will happen when you reach the top and you just, focus. Foot here, hand there, lift, foot there, hand here, lift.

Now some of you might be wondering, “Well yeah but don’t you feel all sore mf tired after the day ends? Don’t your legs hurt? And your hands, and your feet? Don’t you have knee problems?” And that’s why extreme sports are a compromise. You get to have your fun, you get to push your body to its limits, and at the end of the day you get to deal with the consequences.

Now, if you know how to take care of yourself after, whether that be a nice warm bath or a soothing massage, it can help reduce the amount of pain and discomfort, but if you really want to push yourself in extreme sports, you have to admit your body will take a few hits here and there.

I want to include this final bit for anyone who is considering trying an extreme sport after reading this. Extreme sports are fun, really fun, but it’s a domain where one mistake can break a bone, leave you paralysed or worse. Don’t rush into something you aren’t ready for. Take it slow, reach out to people who know what they’re doing, sign up for classes, and never do it alone. You will get hurt, but taking it slow and learning how to take a fall properly will make the difference between a scraped knee and a visit to the hospital.

Never, and I mean never let anyone pressure you into trying a sport, or anything that you know you can’t handle. It’s always good to push your limits a little further each time but never do anything you know you can’t do. If you see those people hitting crazy jumps on TikTok, it’s because they took the time to learn how to do it properly.

That’s all from me for today, thank you for reading, stay safe and stay active!