Friends described Joe Kittinger as an American hero, who parachuted from a balloon 20 miles above Earth, crossing the Atlantic Ocean alone in a balloon and hunting alligators into his 80s.
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I realized seconds into the free fall of my first tandem dive way back in November 2001 that this was a feeling I had to keep chasing. So 12 years ago, I quit my consulting job to skydive competitively.
Seriously, it s a legit sport that dates back to around 1930 in Russia, when jumpers aimed to land as close to a target on the ground as possible. Today, there are seven different competition disciplines, and formation skydiving the style I often do is scored based on the the number of formations or patterns we can repeatedly perform in a certain number of seconds, all while free falling.