Why I go extreme: for world class adventure athlete Will Gadd, real life begins up in the clouds.

• Author: Gadd, Will
• Position: Sports

The man lecturing me, as he eyed my flying equipment, was in his mid-40s, with a monster-truck-tire gut and wearing corporate baseball cap. "People like you ought to be locked up before you kill yourselves," he said. "You're a 911 call waiting to happen."

I was preparing to launch my nylon paraglider (basically, a parachute that glides like a hang glider) from the side of the road over a 10,000-foot-high alpine pass in Colorado. I was really looking forward to stepping off the ground catching a thermal updraft like a hawk, and heading for the clouds. No motor, just the whisper of the a and the silence of the sky. I'd hiked up to the pass in the morning with some friends, while Mr. 911 had driven and parked his motor home when tie saw our brightly colored gliders on the hillside.

UP AROUND THE CLOUDS

I felt like making a smart-allecky remark about his physical condition and chances for a heart attack. Instead I smiled, and told him that I'd soon be flying up around the clouds, high over the Rocky Mountains, feeling alive as I never do when working behind my desk. I told him that if he wanted to try paragliding I could take him for a tandem ride later in the day off Aspen Mountain. He looked at me like I'd suddenly grown another head, but his wife looked interested. I gave them a paragliding brochure, then pulled my wing up like a giant kite and let it pull me smoothly into flight. My friends followed, and we could hear the man mid his wife yelling excitedly up into the air until their voices faded away, thousands of feet below.

I hung from dozens of high-tech strings no thicker than the lines we all used to fly our kites as kids. I used to fantasize about my kite lifting me into the sky and all the adventures I could have up there; now it was reality. I tightened my circle to stay in the best part of the warm updraft, then a red-tail hawk joined me for a few turns, wing tip to wing tip, before it beaded off on its own personal mission.

Nothing makes me feel more alive, excited, and fundamentally happy exploring gravity on its own terms. Many of the sports I do are considered "EXTREME, DUDE!" But that's just marketing hype cashing in on something very personal and ultimately very rewarding.

Of course, "extreme sports" are dangerous, I have had friends die climbing, kayaking, mad paragliding. But I've also had friends die in car accidents, from heart attacks, and simply from the burden of living in the high stress 21st century.

I try to do my...