Slacklining is actually very simple. It’s only in your head that it gets complicated.
When I do it, I just stand up on the line, step off the cliff, put on a good house mix or crazy dubstep, and it just gets me out of my own head. I stop thinking, I stop talking to myself, and I’m just in the mode. I’m just walking. That’s the moment that I live for.
Finding that mental state is why I do it in the first place. Sure, I’m risking my life, but I do it to get out of my head and into this moment. In that second, all you’re doing is focusing on where you’re heading, and balancing and follow the rhythm. It’s euphoric.
Anything I’ve ever done in life, whether it be snowboarding or playing paintball or climbing, are all about pursuing the same thing for me. When you start doing them, you’re not thinking about your problems in life or what you have to do later that day, you’re in the moment of what you’re doing. And that’s exactly where my head is when I get on a line.
I first heard about slacklining watching a documentary about Andy Lewis. I had just started rock climbing after moving to Vancouver. I felt that I was missing something still, and even though I wasn’t actively looking for it, but it found me when I went to a film festival and I saw the sketchy indie movie, and I walked out of there just like completely changed.
As soon as I walked out of that theater, I had this whole idea of everything that I could do in my area. I started immediately, I bought a slackline and started pushing it. It was only three years later that I broke Andy Lewis’s world record for the longest free solo, and that put me on the map.
What’s a free solo, exactly? It’s exactly what it sounds like. Usually when you’re slacklining, there’s a harness connected to the rope so that if you fall, you don’t really fall. There’s something to catch you. With free solo, there’s nothing but you and the line. If you fall, the only thing that could catch you is you.
If you’re wondering—of course that scares me, too. That’s the point. It’s getting past your fears that lets you get into that mind state. When you first get on it, it’s natural human evolution that you are scared for your life. You don’t want to be out there, you shouldn’t be out there. It’s not until you truly understand how safe you are, trusting all of your gear or everything that you’ve done to set yourself up for success, that you can actually get out there and get into this state.
The fear you feel is primal. You’re just trying to survive, and surviving is not standing up in the middle of a line with nothing but rocks to catch your fall hundreds of feet below. It’s hanging on to whatever you can and staying secure. You really have to get away from that. It takes a while to get to that point, but once you do, it’s life changing.
I’ve fallen while free soloing. That’s the most terrified I’ve ever been. I was progressing on the line that I walked on for the world record. For some reason, I really pushed myself into a scary place mentally where I was walking the line free solo and fell and caught the line with my hands, barely stopping myself from plummeting down below.
After I pulled myself back up, I went back to the beginning. I stared out at the line, wondering if I could bring myself to get back out.. In that moment, I knew if I ever wanted to do this again, I would have to get back on that line that very instant. I knew deep down that if I didn’t, I would probably never do it again. I thought, ‘a mental roadblock is going to get put up inside of me and if I don’t push through it right now, then it’s simply over, right here, forever’.
It was in that moment, the worst I’ve ever felt in my life, that I got back on that line with more intensity than I’ve ever had before. It’s in those moments that I really push myself, and that’s where I’m most focused. And the next time, I didn’t fall. In my worst moments, it’s so far, so good.
Sometimes, though, I do push myself too far. One day, I was walking back down the mountain after slacklining, and I looked down off the cliff, and I thought to myself, why can’t I just jump? I decided in that moment that I would get into base jumping.
There was a problem, of course. You’re supposed to do at least 200 skydives by the time that you get into base jumping. In my life to that point, I’d done two. I was just a guy who thought he could do anything. I jumped, even as the other base jumpers screamed for me not to, focusing on how comfortable I felt on that cliff, forgetting that once I was headed towards the canopy of the forest, I was on my way towards something I’d never done before. It was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.
I got hurt. It could have been a lot worse. It could have been catastrophic. I was a complete idiot. After that, I got really scared, covered in blood, coming into land at my first jump off the cliff here in Vancouver. I drove home by myself, and shed a tear while looking at myself in the mirror, saying to myself, over and over, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
I’m drove home that day with my hands peeled open, staring at the steering wheel, with blood pouring down my arm. I hit a bit of a roadblock mentally. I had to backtrack a little bit, and I went to this bridge where you land in the snow rather than over the trees, and I repeated it over and over again. When I came back to jumping off the cliff, for once in my life, I took it slow and easy, until finally I felt I knew what I was doing.
The other base jumpers still make fun of me, of course, but I’ve slowly earned their respect. Once they realized that I was going to jump either way, they started giving me their best advice. They probably saved my life by doing that. Community is everything in sports like this.
Lately, something weird has been happening to me. Now I’m the guy that people are coming up to, saying they saw me in a documentary, and that I changed their life. I was so inspired by someone else I never considered I would inspire others too.
Because of that, I’m finally becoming more responsible. I’m leading a community, something I never thought I could do, and while there’s so many people out there that get less attention that are so much better than me, I know there’s a lot I can do to help all these people, and as notoriety grows, there’s only going to be more.
I’m glad I get to be that person, honestly. The feeling I get from people who are just as wild and passionate as I am, that’s the new mental state I’m chasing from here on out.
Pushing the Line is streaming now on Discovery+ on Starzplay Arabia and Jawwy TV
