Today, extreme athlete Dean Potter posted a photo on his Instagram feed of the first ever BASEline. He balanced, with his arms spread, across thin webbing, suspended above a deep canyon. While most would do everything in their power to stay on the line, clinging for dear life, Dean Potter was there to jump off.
Dean Potter performed the first BASEline. BASElining, like it sounds, is a combination of BASE jumping and slacklining. Potter teetered across a line of webbing, wearing only his parachute pack and a pair of pants before diving into the air.
Photo from Dean Potter’s Instagram, by Jim Hurst
The feat was part of the promotion and research for Steven Kotler’s new book the Rise of Superman. The book examines the point of consciousness that all extreme athletes share. “How did they do it?,” the book’s website reads. “In a word, ‘flow.’ Flow is the source code of ultimate human performance. It is a rare and radical state of consciousness where action and awareness merge, self vanishes, time slows down and major aspects of physical and mental performance skyrocket.”
With his Flow Genome Project, Kotler works to explore how this mental state allows rock climbers, snowboarders, surfers and other extreme athletes to make split-second decisions and push their bodies to the their limits.
The book goes out on March 4, 2013, but you can watch the trailer here:
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