Adventure Sports: Adrenaline, Death, and Finding New Ways to Love Them.
Introduction
Those of us who dabble in adventure sports will do so for varying reasons. Perhaps it’s the silence of the mountains. Perhaps it’s the way our senses heighten as we peer over an edge. Perhaps, it’s the agonising intimacy with death that they can create.
Adventure sports can make us feel alive in a way that feels unusually difficult to describe. This can produce a dangerous and complex psychological problem. That feeling, the one we struggle to articulate, can become psychologically seductive. Almost addictive. Thrills that once quenched a need for adrenaline slowly fail to scratch the itch.
I once spoke to somebody involved in adventure sports who reflected on a damning moment of self-awareness: “I got to a point where I realised I was going to get myself killed”.
The statement intrigued me, and has ultimately inspired this edition of Under the tent. We’ll explore the wonderful world of adventure sports through five psychological stages: attraction, intoxication, escalation, mortality and transformation.
Attraction
The definition of adventure sports to this day stands somewhat ambiguously in literature. Historically, definitions branded it non-competitive and claimed they were activities where a mismanaged mistake or accident would most likely result in death. More recent definitions suggest they are competitive (be that via comparison to others or oneself).
Boudreau et al., define it “a self-initiated physical activity that generates heightened bodily sensations and requires skill development to manage perceived and objective risks”. Examples are mountaineering, backcountry skiing, downhill mountain-biking, free solo climbing etc.
The historic definitions unintentionally perpetuate the “adrenaline junkie” stereotype. Describing these sports as purely non-competitive can present as dismissive, and inconspicuously nods towards the notion that they exist solely for sensation-seeking. This framing misses something important.
Most participants, particularly at an elite level, are not reckless thrill-seekers. Research in high-risk sports increasingly show highly skilled, highly prepared, and deeply deliberate risk management. Danger is not ignored by most. It is integrated into a system of judgement, preparation and respect for the environment. So, what’s the attraction to them, if not just a high?
These dangerous environments create a physiological response. To explain this, we’ll have to go way back to the life of early humans and the development of the fight-or-flight response. Imagine a sabre-toothed tiger approaches a camp. Our ancestors spot the tiger and their brains activate the stress response. Their adrenal glands, located just atop the kidneys, pump out adrenaline into their bodies. Their hearts beat faster; lungs accelerate to provide an emergency supply of nutrients to all systems. Their bodies are prepared for immediate action. They act instinctively.
As the battle with the tiger continues, cortisol joins the party. Cortisol is stronger than adrenaline. It suppresses systems unnecessary for survival in that moment, digestion, for example. Their bodies are able to focus entirely on the confrontation.
The tiger is overcome, the threat disappears, their bodies return to a resting state. Any injuries sustained begin to hurt.
The issue is, our technical evolution as a species outpaced biological adaptation. It is now, in everyday life, detrimental. The same stress response is now activated by approaching deadlines, social comparison, financial worries, and everything else that might be stressing out that little brain of ours. The fight-or-flight system was never designed to exist as a constant. Perhaps there lies the attraction to adventure sports.
They allow our stress response to activate and be used for its intended purpose. Short, sharp, intense moments of the body becoming super. We can unlock our very own superpowers; adventure sports are the key. The body becomes temporarily heightened in ways modern life scarcely permits.
Skiing at over 60mph, weaving through trees. It forces the brain to recognise genuine consequence (going splat into a tree). This activates fight-or-flight. Our muscles, our ability to act at speed, our strength, our reaction time, they all increase. Attention narrows completely into the present moment.
Adventure sports athletes are not necessarily pursuing the fear itself, they’re not simply “junkies”. Rather, they are hunting down the rare feeling of complete psychological immersion in a singular moment.
Intoxication & Escalation
That feeling of immersion is by very definition, intoxicating. Not because of the excitement itself, but because the future disappears temporarily. No background noise or mental drift, just utter concentration to remain uninjured and alive. A temporary state of euphoria caused by the activity. The problem is what intoxication can escalate to.
A prevalent theme in addiction folklore is “chasing the first high”. When the body tries a substance for the very first time, the brain, the muscles, the organs, they are all experiencing a first. If the feeling produced is one of euphoria, people often seek to recreate.
Unfortunately, no matter how hard you try, nothing can be experienced for the first time twice. The body knows what’s coming. This theme can be transferred over to adventure sports. Human beings have a mesmerising ability to adapt quickly. What once was an unimaginable task can soon become routine.
I used to dread public speaking, but just the other month delivered a workshop to a room of 50 people. Our goalposts can very easily change. The nervous system recalibrates. The same descent, the same cliff edge, the same line downhill no longer produces the same internal response. Our threshold shifts. We need to go higher, go faster, squeeze through a tighter gap. It may even be imperceptible for a while, but the gradual increase in danger is eerily present.
Escalation isn’t playing into the “adrenaline junkie” stereotype. We’re not talking about a reckless dive into greater danger here. We’re talking about an increase in physical and mental demands. Even if the increase is deliberate and measured, it doesn’t make the activities any less demanding.
Mortality
Adventure sports can create a relationship with mortality that most people won’t encounter directly. In most of our everyday lives, death is abstract. We can’t see it, we can’t feel it, we certainly can’t be it (not if we’re reading this article anyway). It is distant from us, we can acknowledge it conceptually, but we are emotionally cushioned from it.
In high-risk sports, that cushion is thinner. It shifts from a grand plush pillow on a king-size bed, to a thin gymnastics mat you used in primary school PE. In the moment, consequence is immediate and error is not theoretical anymore. That reality can change perception. For confidentiality, the following story is changed, but the underlying principles remain the same.
“I got to a point where I realised I was going to get myself killed”. This person’s sport was extreme ski jumping. They went all over the world searching for the highest and best drops. One day, they thought they’d found a dream cliff. Bigger, better than all the others that had come before it. Fresh, powdery snow lay at the bottom, at an angle perfect to land upon. They and their team assessed the spot and declared it safe. Time to jump. All went well up until the landing.
They got it ever so slightly wrong. Although they walked away from the event with no major injuries. It acted as somewhat of an eye-opening occasion. Risk had become too normalised. It is inherently normal to a certain extent in the adventure game, but their mere survival had disguised itself as immortal competence. The fact that nothing had yet gone wrong was proof that nothing ever would.
The edge of a cliff was a subconscious reference point to be recalibrated around. You can’t jump off the edge of the world, so it gets to a point where you ask “how high do I go?” That’s the realisation this person came to. Ultimately something is going to go horribly wrong, and I can only go so high. The reality of mortality taught them that they needed to fall in love with the sport for reasons other than “how high?”
Transformation
The question for athletes can change over time. “How far can I go?” morphs into “why am I still going?” That distinction can provide a turning point. For the individual I reference in this article, their change was an emergence of teaching.
The relationship with their sport evolved from escalation into stewardship. Their moment of self-awareness revealed a truth larger than them as an individual. It made them realise that many before and many after will endure the same path. Not all will be as fortunate as to have their own moment of realisation.
The ability to pass on knowledge developed over years of flirting with death is rare. Skiers sharing avalanche awareness, free-solo climbers explaining decision-making in critical moments. Relationships with adventure sports mature from personal intensity, actively searching to engage a stress response, to sharing competence and allowing the next generation to compete more safely than the one before.
For our individual, the sport remains a part of their life, but its very meaning has changed. Sharing that competence ensures others understand where the edge is, and how to respect it. Love from the sport no longer comes from activating that stress response but from fulfilment of allowing others to activate it in ways you once did. In a way, vicariously experiencing that feeling by watching others unlock it.
I suppose it could be painfully nostalgic, watching someone feel euphoric doing something that to you, is now barely even a walk in the park.
Not all adventures are the same
This edition was slightly more anecdotal and empirical than those before it. For that reason, I’ll caveat the article by saying, this perspective does not explain every individual who participates in adventure sport. Nor will every athlete follow the same journey I’ve described.
Human behaviour is not as simple as ‘one size fits all’, or we’d have sussed it all out a long time ago. Some individuals may be drawn primarily by the competitive side, the nature, the fulfilment of mastery, an identity, community or even spirituality. There is more to adventure than the intensity itself. Some may never experience the escalation, may never want to chase their first high. People can and do maintain a stable relationship with risk throughout their lives, they don’t need for it to get bigger.
Perhaps that’s why the “adrenaline junkie” stereotype feels so insufficient these days. It reduces a deeply varied and psychologically rich world into something simplistic, caricatured and represented as a lazy trope in Western culture.
Adventure sports don’t exist for the sole purpose of thrill-seeking or flirting with death. More often, they involve complex relationships with presence, meaning, fear, control, stress, primal instincts and personal growth. The attraction is rarely the thrill of the chase, it’s using our bodily systems in the way they were intended to be used, subsequently, imparting that knowledge onto others.
Ultimately, it’s showing that they are much more than a reckless near miss with Death’s scythe. Death will always be present, as is the inherent nature of adventure sports, it’s making sure he’s got a restricted view, rather than a front row seat.
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Source Material
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Bornstein, A. M., & Pickard, H. (2020). “Chasing the first high”: memory sampling in drug choice. Neuropsychopharmacology 45(6), 907–915. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-019-0594-2
Boudreau, P., Mackenzie, S. H., & Hodge, K. (2022). Adventure-based mindsets helped maintain psychological well-being during COVID-19. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2022.102245
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