Mann

I think it sucks if one makes it suck. Not that I'm different or something.

I'm the small one ;)

After reading a whole bunch of threads about skydiving and relationships... I guess I'm just too much to handle.

It's a fun thread! Old, but fun =) 1. Whats your name? Maria 2. How old are you? 23 3. Why did you decide to start jumping out of airplanes? Wanted to know what it feels like and if I dare to. 4. Are you single or taken? Single. 5. Do you have kids? No. 6. What do you drive? 2006 Chevy 7. Have you ever done a kisspass? No. 8. Where do you live? Estonia (Northern Europe) 9. Do you have any pets? No, but would like to have a lab. 10. How many jumps do you have? 17 11. What color eyes do you have? Green. 12. What is your nationality? Estonian. 13. Have you ever dated someone you met off the internet? Met - yes. Dated - no. 14. Favorite Movie? The man from earth 15. What do you do when you arent skydiving? Working, studying. Waiting for a weather break ;) 16. Have you ever BASE jumped? No. 17. If not... do you want to? When I'm good enough - yes. 18. Do you have siblings? A brother. 19. Where do you want to travel to the most? Antarctica. 20. What's your favorite color? Red. 21. Where was the last place you flew to ( not skydiving )? Svalbard archipelago.

What about using a fullface helmet? It will have a clear lense in front of your face thus keeping the wind off your face. Not that I know if it's even allowed to wear a fullface so early on. Any other opinions?

This thread hasn't been updated for a while, but I though I might pop in and put my 2 cents on the table. After all - this is where I looked for help when I had no idea what to do about MY spinning problem. Luckily, it's solved by now. My problem probably lay in the fact that I had done previous levels (stable flight for 5, 10 and 15 seconds) with no need to repeat anything. Bellyflying had just... happened! I had no idea how exactly I was doing it, but I always ended up belly-down just as soon as the plane had gone out of my view. So of course I thought that next level, turning, was going to miraculously happen just as bellyflying had. Guess what? It didn't. At first, when I asked fellow skydivers about turning and what exactly makes one turn in the air, I got a bunch of different replies. "It's enough for you to turn your palms to induce a turn." "No, palms won't do you any good. As a student you do so much with your feet that you're going to compensate everything your palms do. Move your feet." "Make your body into propeller-shaped thingy, right shoulder down while left thigh down." And the best of them all: "Oh, don't sweat it. Just think 'Turn', look in that direction and your body will do the rest." Uhmm... yeah. I'd lay in our packing area practicing, but it would just not settle in. "So if I move my right shoulder... wait, that's my left shoulder. So if I move my right shoulder, I need to lower my left thigh and... wait, what?" I had a very vague idea of what exactly I'm supposed to do while in the air, but I went up anyway, hoping it to "just happen". What happened was that after leaving the plane I slightly spun to the left, thinking I had induced it myself at first. When I realized that I didn't know how to stop it, I knew: "I don't really know how to turn yet." I deployed while turning. No line twists, though! Once on the ground I practiced a bit more. They would look at me and correct my body position, helping me to understand what exactly is happening with my feet as they're out of my view anyway. And honestly - as a student skydiver I have no control whatsoever over toes, angles etc, as it's just waaaay to much information to handle at first. =) When I went up for the next try it happened again, this time faster: I spun to the left and nothing I did helped. I'd tap my feet, change the way I held my shoulders, move my feet - nothing. I was spinning left and deployed still turning. No line twists, again. Third time was the scariest. I didn't feel right about going up that day anymore as I was already frustrated with unintentional spinning, but... at the same time I was so angry with myself that I wanted to "tough it out and do it". The moment they opened the door of our plane I could feel cold chills in my stomach. "Oh god no, I don't want to go through it again." You can see from the video that it doesn't look bad at the exit (www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyNe5IH_M9A, I'm the first one to leave), but as soon as I started to see ground it was spinning already. And this time - fast enough to make me sick. I tapped my feet - nothing. I tapped them again - nothing. I "bombed" with collecting my hands/legs on my chest, rolling over the back and spreading out again, but I was spinning left anyway. I was flying in the air while wishing to be on the ground already. Man that feeling sucks! In fact, it was so hard to keep my hands stable in that spin that I couldn't really see my alti, it was shaking so bad. I deployed "somewhere around" deployment altitude and looking back, I probably deployed later than usual. Needless to say that I didn't feel good that evening - nor the next or the next after that. Every time I looked at that video or though about skydiving in general, by stomach went cold. 3 weeks later I was back at our dropzone, but this time: with another agenda. I'd read a quote at skydivingmovies.com. Somebody was describing his instructor with these words: "I was nervous and he told me "Everybody says to relax. It doesn't work. It's like telling someone not to think of a blue elephant. Just think 'smile'"" I don't know about you guys, but to me it just made sense. I decided to postpone passing levels (a.k.a turning) and go back to the basics. "Forget turning, spinning, body movement, all the technical details anyway. Just focus on one: get out that damn plane and smile from the very first second. Fuck spinning! Fuck turning! Just smile and enjoy." And I did! I don't know if it was more due to me smiling or the fact that I'd finally gotten that right-shoulder-left-thigh move (I'd been practicing in my bed every evening), but everything worked. I was able to stop my left turn, make it into a right one, then stop it again and even get a second or two of stable flying before deploying. Boy oh boy was I shouting once under the canopy! =D "Wohoooooo! Whoa! Hell yeah!" the air was filled with me and my parachute. "Hell yeah!" Next time I went out that plane, I didn't have to tell myself to smile - I just did without telling. Skydiving had become a thing to enjoy again and I was excited to get out and rock the air. I had learned once more that wishing something really bad doesn't necessarily make it happen faster as all this tension has to manifest in some way or another. It sure feels that "laying" on the wind makes it way easier that "toughing it out" on the wind. Can't wait to see what's going to happen when I start learning backflips =D

Just to let you know: my spinning problem is gone. Gone! =D We got a beautiful sunny day today, first one in weeks, so of course we spent it jumping. It might as well have been our last this season. Yesterday I read a quote at skydivingmovies.com where somebody was describing his instructor: "I was nervous and he told me "Everybody says to relax. It doesn't work. It's like telling someone not to think of a blue elephant. Just think 'smile'" It sounded good, so I decided to try it out. I set it up as my agenda for the day to just get out of that plane and smile from the very first second. And it worked! It really worked! No more spinning, guys. It's (and I am) getting better jump by jump.

I figured I might as well introduce myself, as I've spent hours going through these forums anyway. So here it goes. Hi everyone, my name is Maria. I'm a little Estonian, 23 years old, and started with skydiving this season, only a couple of months ago. Right now I've got only 15 jumps under my skin and as we're doing IAD courses (instead of AFF) I'm still learning my turns, exiting at 5000 feet and have a long way to go. My first jump on June 22nd didn't leave me with much of an impression. Although my heart was racing as I was putting on the gear, everything became calm as soon as the plane took off. Man, was I surprised! I don't know if I didn't have any fear or I just didn't know what to be afraid of, but I just sat in that cramped space (our jump-plane is a tiny Britten Norman Islander, 10 people altogether) and ran through my jump-process, over and over and over again. "I get on the door, put my left hand here and right one there, look at my instructor, he asks "Are you ready?", I shout "Ready!", he says "Go!", I push my body out, spread my hands, arch..." When the time came, I just did it. I didn't contemplate, didn't look down, didn't even think about it - I just crawled to the door, did what I had trained myself to do and went. After 2 seconds the fall was over. A couple of line twists and a steering control later I was sitting in the harness, still 4200 feet high, and I couldn't see the beauty in it. Yeah, the sun was low and I could see miles away, but there was no depth perception: I was sitting above a map and that was it. "So what exactly makes it fun?" I asked myself and decided to go on with my training program until I was allowed into a freefall - and if that didn't give me a kick I expected, I promised I'd find something better to do. Looking back - boy oh boy was my life about to change. 6 weeks later I was doing my first 5 seconds. Some bad weather and my own stupidity (I got my ankle stuck under a motorcycle, so it was blue and swollen for quite a bit of time) had made the process slow and long, but finally the time was there: I was ready to go. The way I came back to the packing area says a lot about the outcome. I was overflowing with all the excitement and one of our older guys hollered: "So was it better than sex?" and I answered: "Better than some, yes." The next jump was supposed to be 10 seconds, but it turned into "altimeter awareness opening" instead, because I lost my count after 3 and not knowing where 10 seconds ends flew until the usual student deployment altitude, 3600 feet. It was awesome! I screamed and shouted and laughed, the air filled my mouth and made my cheeks wobble. Surprisingly enough, I flew on my belly the whole way down, probably because I remembered a friend's advice: "As soon as you relax, it works." Coming back to the packing area that older guy came up to me and asked, this time quietly: "So was it better than sex now?" - "Yes, now it was better than sex. Period." And it was! Now, after 15 jumps, I'm struggling with unintentional turning, but I'll get through it, no worries. Right now I'm going through a stage most of us have experienced - that I-never-shut-up-about-skydiving thing. I'm ready to talk my friends to death! Luckily enough, they understand and appreciate my need to share the experience. It's not even that much about skydiving itself as it is about the people: the amount of great personalities in unbelievable! Somebody described it very well on dropzone.com. I don't remember the exact phrase nor can I find it (I tried, but there's way too much information on these forums), but it went something like this: "At the beginning we are so overwhelmed by the sport that we annoy all of our friends, because all we talk about is skydiving: how great it is and how we like the people we've met. It isn't before skydiving becomes something we do - instead of being something we are - that we truly start to understand it." I might be overdoing it, of course, because I only remember the impression that post left me with, not the text itself. It doesn't matter, though, because the point remains the same: it will take time before I start understanding what skydiving is ABOUT. The bad thing about skydiving in Estonia is our climate. The autumn is here already! Constant raining, low clouds and strong winds don't get along well with skydiving. Our season is more or less over and it won't be before April or May that skydivers get their spark back. I've already asked them to train me to become a rigger (there's a lot of time for that when the winter darkness is here ;)) and meanwhile, I'm enjoying my life and everything. Skydiving has opened some kind of channel of energy I wasn't aware of before. We lost a dear friend this summer, first fatality in 10 years our club has existed. I felt awkward in a situation where people were grieving and everybody was trying to stay quiet (except our press agent) until media had found something else to pick about. Weirdly, it made me closer to them. I don't perceive it as a shock, if anything, it made me appreciate the opportunity of flying even more. I can't say that I hadn't enjoyed life to the fullest before I got involved, but it sure gave me a kick in the ass: "Don't get comfortable, you know!" I'm planning on going back to Alaska this coming summer (I've got a habit of working abroad as a way of vacationing or something), but I'm also thinking if I should contact some dropzone instead and spend a summer learning to fly. I don't know yet, we'll see. PS. My 12th jump (altitude awareness a.k.a "fly until you hit the deployment altitude") is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYcygmvuy3Y - I'm the first one to leave. And my last jump, 15th (turning a.k.a "learn how to stop spinning left") is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyNe5IH_M9A - I'm the first one to leave again.