The “Break it Down” Blog

Another blog entry from our trip to New Zealand… perfect fare for a tech blog right? Here I will make it techie: Internet access is expensive here and not as many places as you would find it in the US.

Ok enough about that, we landed at 6am in Auckland after our surprising comfortable 13hr flight on Air New Zealand (why can’t US airlines have this level of quality and services? Who knows…) met friends in the terminal after getting through customs and proceeded to do everything in Auckland.

We started off with a fresh-food French market tucked away at the end of a dead-end street and couldn’t find it at first (we figured we had been tourist-duped) but eventually found it.

After a some fresh pasteries and my untoppable nagging (because I have been unable to think about anything else for the last 3 days due to a fear of heights) we decided to stop eating and go do the Sky Jump before any other activity because we (and by that I mean “I”) couldn’t think about anything else beside what became the scariest thing I have ever done in my life.

Just to set the stage:
• I have a semi-crippling fear of heights
• The Sky Tower is the tallest free-standing structure in the southern hemisphere
• I first heard about the Sky Jump from, G, one of the writers for http://www.upmyownass.com 3 days ago

So far, not too bad… I can just walk away right? Maybe not…

• When I told my wife about it, her response was “Oh yea, that is right next to our hotel”, which I already knew meant: “I want to do it bit don’t want to freak you out so I just wasn’t going to say anything” — she is wonderful like that.
• For the last few years I have been all about self improvement and the last year specifically about facing fears

Well goddamnit, you know where this is going.

When we first parked the car and saw the tower the phrase “Shit… are we sure we want to do this?” came out of everyone’s mouth.

We decided to go see if the ride was even open, hoping it was closed… just today. Nope, no luck, it was open.

We bought our tickets, signed our lives away and then had to take 20mins to talk one of our group members into.

The moment of “OMFG WTF AAHHHH!!!” didn’t happen until the ride up the glassfloor elevator and the looking out the glass panels in the elevator and seeing Auckland’s tallest buildings disapper below us.

That is about when my heart stopped.

Walking into the control room where you meet the guides and realizing this was for real was semi-horror… being out on the ledge, on the edge of it, while the position you leaning out over a 60-story drop, straight down was indescribable terror…

Then the count down started: 3-2…1!

And the worst part is that *you* are the one that has to let go and step off the building; you have to accept that this might result in suicide and walk out from the safety of a metal platform to hanging in the air 60-stories up and falling straight towards the ground.

There were about 75 moments between landing in Auckland and doing the jump and I talked my way through each one.

Overall I am pretty happy with myself and damn glad I did it.

To be honest, the one thing that made me do it more than anything else was that every time we told someone about it, they would say: “”You could never get me to do that!”

… and that was exactly why I had to do it. I don’t want to predefine all the things I will and won’t do before I have even lived 1/3rd of my life. If I did that, all that happens is as I get older, slower and grumpier, my comfort zone of things I will do gets smaller and smaller and smaller, until an adventure to me is just going to a beach in California.

If you don’t push back, that bar you have set in your mind that defines what you want out of life, just keeps falling and falling.

Just to put things in perspective, being ontop of work ladders used to (and still do) scare me… And this is what we jumped off: