At the edge : riding for my life PDF
Preview At the edge : riding for my life
Danny Macaskill AT THE EDGE Riding for My Life Contents Contents #2 1. Death is Not an Option 2. Way Back Home 3. Son of Anarchy 4. Ken and the Inverness Gang 5. The Rider’s Eye 6. An Accidental Viral 7. The Clan 8. Riding the Roofs 9. Danger of Death! Keep Off! (The Spiky Fence Story) 10. Outbreak 11. On the Boulevard of Broken Bones 12. Eat the Bigger Frog First 13. The Concrete Circus 14. Wrecked 15. No Limits 16. The Closest Shaves 17. Matadero 18. Pool Parties 19. The Inaccessible Pinnacle 20. The Viral Formula 21. Musical Interlude 22. It’s a Long Way Down 23. Reinventing the Wheelie Rider’s Speak Acknowledgements Follow Penguin Contents #2 (A.K.A. Do not try this at home) What I do is dangerous, and it’s taken years of practice. Unsurprisingly, there have been plenty of bumps and breaks along the way. I’d hate to hear that somebody has been gravely hurt trying to emulate a rider, especially if they’ve done so after reading this book. Here is a go-to contents list of the injuries I’ve sustained so far. Should you ever feel the urge to back-flip across a wide gap between two buildings, please read the following pages before getting on your bike … 1. Plough Skull Smash 2. The Molten Lead Incident 3. The Curious Tale of the Bruised Heel 4. Collarbone Injury #1 5. Collarbone Injury #2 6. Fish-tank Skin Infection 7. Collarbone Injury #3 8. The Perils of Slipping in Goose Crap 9. How to Rupture a Disc 10. Going under the Knife 11. Lost in Labyrinthitis 12. The Footjam Tailwhip Tank Smash Scene One FADE IN (EXT.) The clifftops, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Street-trials rider and film-maker Danny MacAskill is preparing for his most dramatic stunt to date: a front flip from a clifftop ramp, a nerve-shredding feat that should propel him past a series of boulders fifty feet below and into the sea – if all goes to plan. Danny approaches the jump, first by riding the rooftops of Las Palmas under a bright blue sky. He is wearing his Drop And Roll tee and Red Bull helmet. A GoPro has been fixed to the top of it. Through a POV viewfinder we see him hopping down from a ledge; he drops on to a tower of scaffolding. A makeshift ramp has been built below. He lands at the top, pedalling as fast as he can, the edge rushing into view. The horizon is at the end, plus those rocks and a plunge into the ocean swell … Cascadia, 2015 1 Death is Not an Option Nothing was going to stop me from jumping off the cliff. Not the foaming water; not the jagged rocks that bared their teeth with the retreating tide; not the drop – all fifty feet of it. I was going over the edge, whether my bike liked it or not. All around me were cameras to record this final banger. One was attached to my helmet, another buzzed overhead on a drone. Each lens was capturing the size and scale of what I was about to attempt: for the spectacular closing shot of a 2015 video we were calling Cascadia, I was aiming to race as fast as I could off a ramp. Made from scaffolding, it had been built in a small alley in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The end took me off the side of a cliff, plunging me down, down, down, in a sheer drop to the sea. I’d been pretty confident when I’d first suggested the stunt a few weeks earlier, but on the day I began to stress. I worried the speed in my run-up, or lack thereof, wouldn’t take me over the rocks at the bottom. In some parts the water was only fifteen feet deep, which made for a landing that was less than ideal in my eyes. Meanwhile, the sea looked turbulent. Huge waves moved below, exposing dozens of crabs clinging to previously unseen boulders. Maybe I needed to rethink my trajectory? Will I have enough speed? At the very least I was facing a painful slap to the body as I broke the surface from a great height. And beyond that? Well, who knows. That’s when it happened – the click. After an hour of deliberating, something in my head told me to go. I hit the ramp and pedalled as fast as I could. The buildings whizzed by. The only thing I could hear was the rattling of scaffolding under my tyres. Clang-a-lang! Clang-a-lang! Everything lurched towards me – the sunset, the horizon, the sea. I threw myself over the edge. Wind brushed my face. And then … Nothing. Only silence. And relief. I’m not mad. I’m not mad. I’m sure my YouTube virals might lead you to think differently, but everything I do is planned, calculated; on a bike I know exactly what I’m capable of landing at the top end of my ability, and I only operate within those limits. It might seem like I have a death wish, especially when I’m hurling myself off a cliff face, or across a gap between two tall buildings, but I don’t take many risks – not stupid ones, anyway. Instead, all of my stunts begin with a great deal of preparation, and endless hours of psychological torture: it takes me ages to get my head straight before I’m racing up a ramp and into a bump front flip, or a tyre-tap tailwhip from a huge drop. Most shooting days are spent beating myself up for the fact that I can’t just rush headlong into a jump without fretting about it endlessly. I wish I could deal with it better. Sometimes it’s a pain in the arse. Luckily, I don’t have any phobias. I’m not afraid of heights, or speed, or even spiders, and I have a weird relationship with pain – it doesn’t bother me, which is handy in a lifestyle where spills and face-plants are a constant occupational hazard. But when it comes to street trials – my style of riding, where I negotiate everyday ‘furniture’ such as stairways, benches and railings, usually at fairly high speeds, or over great heights – some challenges can put me on edge. For those of you unsure of what trials riding is about, it started out as a competitive event where a mountain biker had to get up and over obstacles as quickly as they could. The catch? They’re not allowed to put their feet on the ground. In a competition setting, this involves a rider negotiating a marked-out route over logs, rocks, walls or old cars. As soon as they enter the start gate, the clock starts ticking. Competitors have to make their way through the section; every time their feet hit the floor it counts as one penalty mark, or ‘dab’, against them. (The maximum number of dabs a competitor is allowed in one section before being disqualified is five.) Whoever completes the course within the time limit, and with the fewest dabs, is the winner. Street trials became an extension of that style, but it wasn’t competitive. Rather than navigating barricades within a set period, it involves a mountain biker being creative on objects that people use every day. (For example, those bus stops, phone boxes and railings you walk past on the way to work.) In more recent years, these stunts have often been filmed and put out on VHS, or DVD, and now they are placed on to social media, where, if the cyclist has been lucky, they go viral. Being a street-trials rider can be a risky business. For starters, there are tons of bruises and breaks to endure. I’ve done it all my life, and made plenty of videos along the way, but the fear of crashing never disappears, especially when it
Description:The list of books you might like
