Last Saturday I made a sunset jump with my boyfriend and a bunch of good friends.

Sunset is my favorite time of day to jump. And we were doing a track dive, one of my favorite kinds of jumps.

During a track dive, someone (in this case, my boyfriend), leads the group across the sky. We spread out into a V, like a flock of Canada geese.

A track is a style of skydiving that gives the jumper more horizontal distance than vertical distance -- more out instead of straight down. It's used at the end of most every skydive to provide separation between jumpers, so you're not opening your parachute around a bunch of other people.

To do it, you go out the door on your belly, then move your hands down by your sides, roll your shoulders foward, point your toes and poke out your butt. Basically, you fashion your body into a wing, cupping the air beneath you. It looks like this pretty much, though this woman is tracking in more of a diving style.

On Saturday, we exited the plane near the railroad tracks, then made our way around the clouds and back to the dropzone. Acording to the pilot's GPS, we flew our bodies more than a mile during freefall.

How incredible is that?

Sometimes when I fly commercially now, I imagine what I would do if the plane cracked open and started going down. I'd want to make one heck of a last skydive, obviously, so I'm pretty sure I would track as far as possible. (And maybe aim for somebody's car.)

With my very dark sense of humor, I like thinking of the investigators pawing through the wreckage, then puzzling over why my body ended up such a distance away.

And I'm sure somewhere, some skydivers would hear about it and think, "HELL YEAH."

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 25, 2005 at 11:06 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.