Groundrush

Simon Jakeman spends much of his spare time falling through the sky at speeds of up to 120mph. He has leapt from the static rock at the top of Cheddar Gorge, in the dark from a 1000-foot TV mast and from the 39th floor of a Barbican tower block. This is an account of the thrills involved.

---

Working on a building site in the city of London is not an easy way to make a living. For one thing you need to have a head for heights, but that didn't present a problem to Simon Jakeman who spent most of his spare time falling through the sky at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour with a parachute for safe landing. When, together with two friends, he leapt at dawn from an overhanging rock at the top of Cheddar Gorge - some 1,600 feet short of the safety limit for opening a parachute and five seconds to impact in the event of a malfunction - it ended disastrously for two of them. Undeterred, Jake went on t perform ever more daring leaps - in the dark from a 1,000-foot television mast and from the thirty-ninth floor of a Barbican tower block. The quest for the blissful freedom to live the present moment, the 'now of Zen philosophy, and a dangerous adrenaline addiction made it almost impossible for him to stop...Groundrush is a terrifying, often moving, sometimes funny exploration of the relationship of risk to fear - a test of Zen in action at the extreme most of us would not dare approach.