Tag: Adam’s Story

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What are you truly passionate about?

take-your-passion

 

Earlier today, someone asked me a question that got me thinking…

He asked me what I was passionate about… Immediately, I replied “Skydiving”. To which he then asked “why?” sell me on your passion.

Six hours later, I find myself still thinking about the question. I didn’t have a hard time answering him at all, but it got me to thinking do we all truly feel the way I do? Does every other skydiver who’s passionate about the sport truly sold the same way I am? Or maybe I’m the one who’s not as obsessive as they are. Some skydivers I’ve met told me that I was stupid to take time off to rest my sprained knee while others just said “that sucks”.

In life, not everyone finds something to be passionate about, some people spend their entire lives searching for this passion while others know it early on in life. I stumbled upon it randomly while on a “yes man” challenge.

I had spent a year as a yes man starting in January 2009 where my best friend and I would say yes to any and all invitations to participate in activities, go to events, learn things, travel, etc… Obviously, we had to use logic in our endeavors (I did however give a lift to a homeless person, which looking back on it, probably wasn’t the brightest idea, but he did show me a spot where I could park my car for free downtown any night).

That year lead me to learning Salsa dancing, traveling to Cuba, New York, Boston and the Bahamas, bungee jumping, doing my tandem and many many many other things. It probably was one of the best years of my life.
After having done my tandem, I had approached the owners of the DZ and asked them about doing my AFF to which one of them replied “that’s what they all say” and laughed. He did proceed to offer me to join them in Zhills for my AFF course and the rest is history.

Fast forward 4 years and I’m now a sponsored skydiver as well as an equipment dealer and I find myself a big part of the skydive community in Quebec. A lot can change in such a short period of time when you love what you do… So what are you passionate about?

 

Blue ones!

Adam

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Atmosphair’s 20th anniversary… Sun… Wind… Weather hold…

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It seems like the theme of the season is “Weather hold”. Once again, my plans to skydive have been thwarted by the weather.

I arrived at Parachutisme Atmosphair on Friday evening just in time for a lasagna dinner at Marquis’ restaurant on the DZ. Had a couple of beers with friends, then went to bed so I could be up bright and early to get on the plane.The staff were nice enough to lend me a camper to spend the weekend in comfort. Saturday morning, I woke up to the sound of the Caravan taking off for a 16 000 foot jump (the load was completely booked before I even finished work on Friday, so I took advantage to sleep in).

With the sound of the plane flying by, I hurried to get dressed and get myself manifested on the second load. Once manifested, I noticed that there were a bunch of people preparing for a big way and asked to join. Niklas Hemlin was load organizing and I didn’t want to miss this. This pushed me onto the 4th load for a 10 way.
The weather was looking nice, but there were still some clouds out, nothing to worry too much about. We went up and managed to get 4 very solid points done. Niklas was great at identifying peoples’ strengths and weaknesses while flying and was quick to help correct them.

After the first jump, I had myself manifested for another big way and we did our dirt dive for an 8 way…

Then it happened…

It started to rain….

Then it started to pour….

We could see the holes in the clouds mocking us but they were being blown towards us. The rain stopped. We prepared ourselves to get on the load when it happened “C and D licenses only, wind is up to 21 MPH”.
Those words tore a hole right through my chest. I had been looking forward to jumping for weeks and haven’t gotten to because of the weather and here I am, at the DZ waiting to get on the plane… What a kick in the pants!

As everyone prepared to get on the plane, the microphone blares “weather hold”. All the C and D licensed skydivers’ faces turned red as they were already geared up and ready to go. They put their gear away and I laughed at the irony.

This pattern happened several times over the next 8 hours. Needless to say, we waited a LONG time for our next big way.

In the meantime, I took advantage to converse with Niklas about life, his experiences, how he ended up living in the US. It turns out it was fairly simple: He wanted to skydive. He was born in Sweden which has similar weather to Canada. Summer time, you could skydive… When the weather permitted of course. The rest of the year just sucked. So he decided to move.

While we waited for the weather to improve, Pierre, one of the DZOs and I gave out several participation prizes that were graciously donated by our friends at Deepseed and UPT (Thank you both!!!)

At around 5 pm, the clouds were all gone and the wind was dying down, so we prepared ourselves and got a 12 way going. Once again, we got 4 solid points and had a good time doing it.

We had just enough time to get one last jump done, just in time for sunset. Niklas decided to make us work harder on this one, a satellite formation. We all had a MUCH harder time with it (myself included), but it was a lot of fun. 3 points and nearly a 4th again. We clearly won’t be winning the world competitions with this kind of performance, but I must say that I had an amazing time doing them.

The day was followed by a steak dinner at Marquis’ which was very welcome as I was famished.

I must commend the team at Atmosphair for their organization. They set up a boogie with some of the lowest prices ever seen in Quebec (20$ + tax for a jump) and managed to pull off an amazing event regardless of the weather. My hat’s off to you guys!

Blue Skies!

Adam

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I. HATE. RAIN.

So for any of you who have been around Quebec… Or actually eastern Canada for that matter, you’ve probably noticed the erratic weather that’s been going on.
During the week it’s extremely sunny, come Friday, they’re announcing thunder showers and huge winds.
It’s hurricane season in the Caribbean and we suffer the consequences. That being said, every one of the past few weeks (Including the CRW weekend) have been canceled due to weather.

This coming weekend, I’ll be attempting to mess with the system and go to Voltige on Monday. Hopefully since it’s a weekday, the weather will cooperate. If not, I’ll be celebrating Parachutisme Atmosphair’s 20th anniversary!!!

Skydive Addiction along with UPT and NZ Aerosports are proud sponsors of the event.

THEY ARE OFFERING 20$ JUMP TICKETS ALL WEEKEND LONG!!!!!

That’s a HUGE deal for a Quebec DZ.

I’ll be there all weekend giving out prizes and random surprises, so keep your eyes peeled for me!

Blue skies everyone!

Adam

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Slow start to the season…

Hey everyone!

 

No, I haven’t disappeared, and no skydive addiction isn’t dead… I simply haven’t had the time to go skydive yet =(.

I’ve been working crazy hours at the office + have been taking scuba diving lessons during the week with Genevieve, so it’s been hectic.

I’ll be at Voltige 2001 this weekend, so I promise to have an update done!

PS: Be on the lookout for me at Parachutisme Atmosphair’s 20th anniversary, I”ll be giving out prizes!!!!!

Blue ones!

Adam

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The winter is long…

So thanks to our long winter, most of the Dropzones around here have postponed opening for another week to clean up the snow that’s been left over and wait for warmer weather.

That part kind of sucks… But while I was waiting for the season to start up, I took advantage to do some wind tunnel training with Andrew Toman at Skyventure Montreal.
Andrew was my first instructor when I first learned to skydive. He was the one who did the ground school, he was also the one who gave me my 1st 20 minute coaching in the tunnel.

He didn’t join us in Florida for the AFF course, but he followed up later on by giving me a good portion of the lessons for my A license.

Now comes the time to learn to back fly and the basics of sit flying.
2 weeks ago and this past week, I had booked a total of 40 minutes of tunnel time with him to work on my back flying.
And work we did… I haven’t had to do it since my B license, so it was quite fun to see myself during the first debrief when I nearly kicked Andrew in the face haha.

In the first 2-4 minutes, we did mostly work in low wind with me simply trying to keep control and move around on the net while learning to change to sit position.
For the rest of the 10 minutes we progressed onto slightly higher wind so that I could work on controlling my fall rate.

In debrief, he showed me what I was doing wrong and we worked on improving that (I was really stiff and flew large, but flew my upper body fairly small….)
so for the next 10 minutes, we worked at improving that and then worked more on holding myself in the sit position.

The following week (this past Monday), I went back to the tunnel to do the second half of the 40 minute block with him.
Armed with some comfort in the back fly position, we went on to see how much I remembered and how I flew now.
I was much more stable, but still had some polishing to do, but we didn’t focus much on that.
Instead, Andrew had me working on my transitions to sit fly and started working on my stability, my turns, my movement forwards, backwards, up and down.
It was VERY awkward… Being that I was someone who had always said that I wasn’t interested in learning to freefly yet as I wanted to focus more on CReW, I was quite surprised to say that I enjoyed it.
A LOT.

I asked Andrew to find me another 10 minutes of time to do some more training, so I’m excited to see how that pans out.

Also: Francois Huot accepted to let me join his CRW seminar in June over the long weekend, so I’m SUPER excited about that!
We’ll be sponsoring a few events this summer as well as showing up with gifts at some boogies, so keep your eyes open for us!

Blue skies everyone!Adam

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Nuit Blanche 2 – Skyventure

Hello Ladies and Germs!

This coming weekend is take 2 of Skyventure Montreal’s Nuit Blanche event. It’s been booked solid for 2 months now as usual, but we’ll be onsite to give you the dirty.

I’ll be doing some 4 way RW  (Relative work) with some strangers, so this should be quite fun!

 

Also: The Quebec Invasion tour is heading to PST again this year, I unfortunately won’t be present, but if all works out, I should have the videos from their trip. Buffalo Wild Wings seems to be sponsoring the event again.

 

I’ll keep all of you posted about that too!

 

Blue Ones!

 

Adam

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So I’m back from Mancun!

Hey everyone!

 

Sorry about the major delay in posts, spent some time down south getting away from the cold.

The weather here’s not so bad, but it’s quite cold. I was hoping to get some skydiving done at the skydive mex boogie, but I ended up on more of a party trip then anything else.
The weather in the Cancun area is really not permissive of safe skydiving anyway… It was about 25-35 mph of wind every day, great for surfing, but that’s about it…
So before my trip, I got to go to the tunnel for about 40 minutes of flying time. 30 minutes at the “nuit blanche” (All-nighter in english) which was a blast. I got to fly with 3 friends of mine who also happen to be much better skydivers than I, so I got to learn enormously and have fun at the same time. We did 3 sets of 10 minutes broken into 2 minute splits. The first 10 minutes involved a lot of getting through the rust I had built up (being that I hadn’t flown in nearly a year in the tunnel) I had quite a laugh when I almost rammed head first into the wall during the first 2 minutes. Afterwards things pretty much progressed nicely. I got to practice 4 way formations, work on my levels, formation speed and we worked towards getting as many points as possible.

By the last 10 minutes, we were doing swimmingly, but it was also 4 am and we were burnt.

 

A few days later, the day before my trip, Geneviève and I decided to go fly for 10 minutes during the day. We couldn’t find anyone else to join us, so we just flew together. We flew as if we were flying with 2 other people that were in formation with us and worked at mostly fun formations. Over-unders side by side, over-unders while doing 180 degree turns, position work, 360 degree turns while holding each other, etc.
This was quite a fun 10 minutes and would’ve been fun to continue.

I received my sexy new suits from Deepseed a while ago, had to mail them back for re-sizing as there was an issue with measurements… Kinda sucks when the company’s on the other side of the planet, but I’m REALLY excited to get them back as the suits are the best looking suits I have ever seen.

Blue ones everyone!

 

Adam

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Flaming parachute? Yes please!

So you thought the last video was crazy?

 

Troy Hartman decided that it’d be a good idea to set his canopy on fire… While he was flying it…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3h-RVieE4Y&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

 

Once again, THIS is crazy…

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What is the first thing that went through your head when you went skydiving?

 

 

Yesterday, I spoke about what skydiving feels like because it’s a pretty common question. Today, I figured I’d go about another quite common question I get…

What is the first thing that you thought when you went skydiving?

Well, the truth is, it’s the same thing that went through my head when I went bungee jumping… I though to myself “Why do I always put myself through these things?”
I don’t mean to say that it was a bad though, simply a confused one, I wondered to myself why it is that I always participate in adrenaline sports, what attracts me to them. Why do I feel the need to do them.

For me, it’s pretty simple. Without even discussing the whole psychological aspect to it, I’m an adrenaline junky. My common sense often tells me that these things may not be a good idea, but then once I get a feel of them, I simply go through with it. Never have I regretted listening to my adventurous side…. Ok, maybe once in Spain when I got hit by a truck, but aside from that, I’ve never regretted it.

 

What goes through your mind when you’re about to do something “crazy”?