WHAT IT FEELS LIKE...

Some feats seem unachievable. Climbing Everest in mere days. Kayaking solo across the ocean. Scaling a skyscraper with your bare hands. Few ever face such challenges. Fewer still embrace them with wideopen arms. You're about to read their stories, in their own words-of fear, hope, failure, and triumph, but always passion. This is what it feels like to experience life at its most extraordinary.

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...TO SURF IN THE SKY Sean MacCormac, 50, skydiver

WHEN THE HELICOPTER DOOR SWUNG OPEN, wind slapped me awake. Standing on my board on the skid, looking out over the Bay Bridge, I felt electrified. Twenty-two thousand previous jumps led to this moment. None of this was wasted on me.

Skydiving was supernaturally intuitive for me. At eighteen, I saw a photo of French skydiver Patrick de Gayardon "skysurfing"-the art of strapping a modified snowboard to your feet and using it to fly around. Unlike regular snowboards, these are extremely rigid and light, more like airplane wings. You can use the board as either a propeller or a wing, shooting across the sky at 200 miles per hour. I tried myself, and within hours I was doing tricks that should've taken months to master.

But skysurfing has always felt incomplete. Everyone kicks their board off before landing, treating it like disposable gear. I spent more than a decade honing swooping hook turns, diving at 70-plus miles per hour, then converting that energy into forward momentum to skim just above the ground.

With that ethos, I came up with the idea to grind the San Francisco Bay Bridge. With its suspension cables stretched like rails across the sky, it looked like the most natural skate structure imaginable.

The technical requirements were insane. Jump from a helicopter at five thousand feet. Open my chute with only fifteen hundred feet to set up my approach-about twenty-five seconds of decision-making time. Execute a hook turn that would double my speed into a dive at the bridge tower. Then land on a three-quarter-inch steel safety cable. Grind the cable, dismount, and land on a floating barge. Miss by millimeters and I'd slam into steel rebar two hundred feet above the road, five hundred feet above water, with no time for a reserve chute.