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Throwing yourself off tall buildings is addictive, as Barney Ronay learns tagging along with Britain’s premier jumper

Thirty-six floors up on a tower block roof in the wee hours of a humid Thursday night the eastern fringes of the City of London look very different from the meandering claustrophobia of pavement level. Up here London becomes a series of peaks, an alpine illumination invisible from the daily gridlock. It is beautiful, frightening and unexpectedly quiet. To Dan Witchalls, Britain’s premier base jumper (the acronym stands for “Buildings, Aerials, Spans and Earth”), the skyline also represents a kind of panoramic 3D curriculum vitae. “See that. The stock exchange. Done that,” he says, as he busies himself with some final preparations. “Over there, The Shard. Done that. Wembley Stadium. We did that. Security got us when we landed on the pitch.”

This is a career hazard for the urban base jumper, a pursuit that involves entering tall buildings, usually at night and often illegally, and jumping from the top with just a small sky-diving parachute to ease your fall. A 10-year base veteran, Witchalls has also jumped off Nelson’s column, the Trellick tower and pretty much any central-London object you’ve ever found yourself squinting up at (only the Gherkin seems designed to remain unconquered: “The curve,” he shrugs. “You’d kill yourself trying”). Most recently he has taken a different kind of leap: sideways out of a cultish in-house notoriety into a more mainstream televisual fame. Along with his friend Ian Richardson he was the star of last month’s stunning Channel 4 documentary The Men Who Jump Off Buildings – although it turns out this is a slightly misleading title. Witchalls also jumps off cranes, bridges and cliffs.

It is a misleading title in other ways too. The urban jumper does much more than simply jump. He scouts buildings. He studies security arrangements. He reads the weather (strolling the darkened pavements Witchalls discharges in his wake a trail of small folded bits of paper, his wind tell-tales). He also breaks in: we gained access to our chosen rooftop disguised as Village People-esque builders; later, faced with a potentially catastrophic locked door, Witchalls somehow levered himself through a window 10ft off the ground and roughly the size of a letterbox. And so here we are at last, brooding above the night-time skyscape, only one of us with any thought whatsoever of taking the stairs back down. Up here Witchalls reminds me briefly of another London legend: Spring Heeled Jack, a mythical Victorian prankster-cum-outlaw said to have been seen leaping from roof to roof after dark.

In fact Witchalls is one of elite base jumping’s least shadowy figures and the sport’s most visible public face. Previous portraits have tended to emphasise the contrast between his vertiginous hobby and the amiable normality of his daily life as an Essex roofer; albeit one who prepares for a night of urban freefall by laying his parachute out on the bed in the spare room of the semi he shares with his girlfriend.

In the flesh there is still something quietly unsettling about him. Perhaps this is related to the covert nature of our meeting, which involved a set of illegal-rave style last-minute instructions that ended in the McDonald’s car park next to Canary Wharf. Secrecy is, of course, a necessary part of all this. “Base jumping isn’t illegal,” Witchalls says as we scope out a Docklands office block. “But it does usually involve trespassing. All these buildings are private property. They really don’t want you jumping off them.”

There is also, you feel, an element of theatre. Twenty years on from its initial public emergence in the 1990s base jumping still feels like an act of personal rebellion, aligned in spirit with other extreme activities such as free-running, and even skateboarding and the more pretentious kind of graffiti. It is tempting to muse on the philosophy of base jumping, its rejection of the tyranny of oppressive city architecture, and the urge to reclaim a hunk of privately outsourced urban space.

” I don’t know about that. I just like doing it because it’s fun,” Witchalls shrugs. And in the flesh he seems closer to an elite athlete – the same neat movements and disquieting air of self-possession as a footballer or a gymnast – than a tousle-haired free-thinker. He also appears to be in scandalously good shape, not to say extremely well preserved for a man who must be in his mid- to late-40s (it is hard to be more exact because he ignores the question when asked). What exactly are the qualities required of the top-rung base jumper?

“You need to have good reactions. But above all you just need to keep your nerve,” he says. “You only get one chance. You can’t make mistakes up there. I’ve seen enough injuries. I don’t want to end up banged up in some hospital bed with screws and pins holding me together. “

At this point it is tempting to ask the big question: why do it at all? Base jumping is an absurdly dangerous hobby. The real risk is not so much injury as death; most accidents are bad accidents. The many internet base jumping resources dwell on such technical topics as “entanglement” and “fatal malfunction”. In the last 29 years there have been 147 known deaths. A blog on the sport’s official website warns: “In my short time in this sport I’ve seen two life flight helicopters from the outside, two more from the inside, the back of a police car, several broken bones and a funeral. I’ve also spent three weeks in intensive care and 18 hours in neurosurgery. Are you sure you really want to do this?”

The short answer is of course: no. I don’t want to do this at all. Not only that, as we scope out a landing site, a scrubby patch of grass between lampposts, I’m starting to wish Witchalls had never taken it up in the first place either. “I never planned to become a base jumper,” he says. “I was into sky diving and I had a friend who did this. I came along one time, I watched him do it, but I never once thought it was for me. Eventually he said, ‘Go on, have a go,’ but right up to that moment I really didn’t mean to do it.”

In time, base jumping became something of a refuge from a pre-jumping past that had involved “clubbing, going out, all the rest of it”. “To be honest it saved me from all that. I was a bit of a party animal. I’ve got mates now who still go out a lot and I find myself saying no, I’m busy. I’ll get up in the middle of the night and do a jump and come back and my girlfriend won’t even know I’ve gone. Sometimes I think there is an element of addiction in it. But I will stop at some point. You have to.”

This will be a poignant moment. There is a sense that Witchalls might be one of the last of the old base breed. All this creeping about, the night-crawling and fence-hopping: it can’t really go on for ever. For a start, base itself is coming out from the underground and becoming quietly managed and formalised, a part of the extreme mainstream. Why break into a building in the middle of the night when you can go on a course and leap under the aegis of an accredited instructor? You can base jump on your stag do now or arrange an away weekend at some officially sanctioned rural platform.

“Yeah, maybe I could become an instructor,” Witchalls shrugs, looking unconvinced. “I’m not sure it’s for me. I wouldn’t want the responsibility if things ever went wrong. I don’t want to tell anyone to base jump. You’ve got to just want to do it.”

This was pretty much how base jumping started out, an underground hobby formalised for the first time in 1978 when a Californian called Carl Boenish made a documentary film of his wife and two friends leaping off a rock in Yosemite national park. Before long Boenish and his friends were jumping off bridges and electricity masts. They coined the guiding acronym. Word began to spread, undimmed by Boenish’s own death in 1984 jumping off a bridge. Some headline moments followed: in 1985 the James bond film A View to a Kill brought base its first big screen appearance, a villainous chase-scene leap from the Eiffel Tower. Five years later the sport made waves in the UK when an Englishman called Russell Powell jumped from the Whispering Gallery inside St Paul’s, a mind-bogglingly short drop. Two years ago Hervé Le Gallou and an unnamed man from Darlington jumped off Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world (Le Gallou was caught trying to repeat the jump and was detained by police for three months).

It was from these Californian roots that base jumping’s venerated numbering system sprung: you can apply for an official “base number” when you’ve carried out all four genres of jump successfully (ie without dying). Currently around 1,400 base numbers have been allocated. But it really is just men jumping off buildings. Even the sport’s governing acronym, with its “S” for “span” (instead of “B” for “bridge” – narrowly avoiding the furrowed humiliation of “babe jumping”) tells a story. Witchalls can’t recall a single regular female jumper. His girlfriend, a fellow sky-diver, has yet to join him on a base jump. With its Batman-like nocturnal solemnities, it seems that in base the lone male has uncovered an extreme, adrenaline-fuelled form of shed-hiding or allotment-lurking.

It is only 36 floors up on the roof just across from Tower Bridge that this solitary aspect of base jumping becomes clear. After a brief hunched pause during which it seems Witchalls might be saying a prayer or silently psyching himself up – but is in fact simply fiddling with his harness – it is finally time for the man who jumps of buildings to jump off a building. “Come over here and watch,” he says, indicating the outermost six inches of unfenced tower block roof.

I’m crawling towards the ledge just as he calls out, “See you on the ground,” with the air of a man about to pop downstairs for a Pot Noodle. And there he is, off into all that empty air, falling incredibly fast and alarmingly close to the face of the building. After a stomach-ripping second or so of rapid descent his parachute billows and in a gentle, expert parabola he floats away from the jutting brickwork and eases towards the drop zone. Touchdown is witnessed by a group of transfixed night-time strollers. From the rooftop it looks as though they’re clapping.

Ten minutes later, having fumbled through fire exits and over pigeon netting, hard hat inexpertly in place, I find Witchalls sitting on a bench, chute already packed. He seems replete now, and ready for a snatched few hours before the day’s roofing rolls around again. One thing seems sure. He won’t be back on the ground for long. Keep looking up and you might just catch a glimpse.

• Cutting Edge: The Men Who Jump Off Buildings, is on More 4 on 29 August.

Its almost the weekend and we no your itching to run out the office doors at 5, so whatever your plans maybe, hang on in there, but in the meantime, here’s an awesome clip featuring the team from ‘Flip and Volcom’.Watch David, Luan, Louie and Willow in the ‘Thrilla In Manila Tour to the Philippines.extremepie/News/~4/xRj9hVjRB4w” height=”1″ width=”1″ />

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Torture Tunnels, Death Plunge, Stalag Escape … these are just a few of the obstacles tackled by competitors in the Nettle Warrior race. Would ‘wetneck’ Rachel Dixon go the distance?

Gallery: The best pictures from the event

I am crouching beside the Torture Tunnels. Groans escape the entrance hole, punctuated by shouts of pain. A wave of panic washes over me, but I’ve come this far; I can’t give up now. I take a deep breath and drop down into the muddy gap. As I start to drag myself through a narrow concrete pipe, in the pitch-black, a woman screams: she’s just been caught by an electric wire, invisible in the darkness.

This is Nettle Warrior, the summer version of Tough Guy, an endurance event in Perton, Staffordshire. Like the original, which takes place in January, Nettle Warrior involves a gruelling cross-country run and assault course. Unlike Tough Guy, competitors don’t have to deal with sub-zero temperatures. To compensate, they go twice around the assault course instead of once, spend more time submerged in muddy water, and tackle 7ft stinging nettles. Suffice to say, it’s no walk in the park.

The organisers conjure an aura of terror in the build-up: the race is billed as the “most dangerous test of mental and physical pain, fear and endurance” in the world. We had to sign death warrants before competing, were inundated with warnings about hypothermia, tetanus and ‘flesh rippers’, and were emailed tales of past participants’ terrible injuries. The scare tactics worked: I was petrified.

The macho nature of the event is also hyped up. Officials wrote our race numbers on our foreheads in marker pen. On successful completion of the race, Tough Guys are permitted to shout “Yohimbé“, which apparently translates as “My dick’s bigger than yours”. Women are vastly outnumbered by men, and tend to be accompanied by solicitous male partners.

However, as many readers pointed out when I wrote about my training regime, Tough Guy/Nettle Warrior is not really terrifying at all (provided, as tomlozethwaite put it, “you don’t mind heights, fire, water, mud or confined spaces. Or barbed wire. Or nettles”), nor is it an ultra-serious test of fitness. The first clue to this was the gang of guys dressed as Smurfs. And the women dressed as fairies. And the man wearing nothing but a thong … It is a challenging test of endurance, though, and above all it is a lot of fun.

In the moments before the cannon fired to start the race, I was overcome with a kind of grim resignation. The start is staggered, and as a ‘wetneck’ (first-timer), I was at the back of the pack. When I finally crossed the starting line, I half-ran, half-slid down the steep slope and set off through what resembled a minefield (they were actually flares, but created a convincingly smoky warzone effect).

As a very reluctant jogger I had dreaded the cross-country run more than anything else, so I was probably one the few competitors to actively welcome the pits filled with muddy water that greeted us almost immediately. Anything to break up the run. When I emerged, soaking wet and caked in filth, and ran on feeling twice as heavy as usual, I did rethink my enthusiasm somewhat. But with more than 2,500 runners the trail ahead quickly filled up, and soon there were more bottlenecks than clear runs, allowing plenty of chances for a breather.

This quickly emerged as a theme: get wet and muddy; queue for a bit; run when you get the chance. Luckily, the weather was kind – overcast but warm. In January, it must be a different story. As previous competitors had warned me, it’s nearly impossible to get ahead of the pack and finish in a fast time unless you start near the front. For most, though, the challenge is merely to complete the event, not to try to win it. As the founder, Billy Wilson (aka Mr Mouse), said on Sunday: “It’s not a race, it’s an event – it’s for people to come and challenge the Tough Guy course. Everybody here is a winner.”

The slaloms, a punishing series of hill runs, are infamous in Tough Guy circles, so I was relieved to run up and down them with ease … or so I thought. In actual fact, they were just the warm-up hills. I defy anyone to tackle the real slaloms with anything approaching ease. Imagine a sheer hillside. Now picture yourself climbing up and running down it, again … and again … and again. I think there were around a dozen slaloms in all, though it’s hard to be sure – by the end I was a little delirious.

The rest of the run was a breeze in comparison: crawling under nets and jumping over giant hay bales were nothing next to those hills. That is, until we reached the mud slaloms. Similar to the hill slaloms, these involved sliding down a muddy bank into pond full of filth, clambering out again – with great difficulty if, like me, you’re somewhat vertically challenged – moving down the bank, and repeating. And repeating. And repeating. It was at this point that the utter pointlessness of the whole endeavour hit home to everyone, and people reacted in one of two ways. They either embraced the futility, as I did, and doggedly ploughed on – or they cheated. In fact, from this moment onwards the cheating – mainly skipping obstacles – was rife. Not that I’m bitter …

On a more positive note, this was also the point that the legendary Tough Guy spirit was revealed and everyone started helping everyone else, offering leg-ups out of ponds or holding out a helping hand from the bank. The whole race was notable for its camaraderie and cheerful, ‘we’re all mugs together’ atmosphere.

Slaloms over and nearly two hours in, I finally hit the assault course. Obstacles came thick and fast: the Colditz Walls, the Behemoth, the Dead Leg Swamp, the Stalag Escape … The indoor climbing training I had done came into its own as I tackled the intimidatingly named A-frames, cargo nets and rope crossings. The only hairy moment came when a particularly tall man chose the same roped route as me, stretching the two ropes so far apart that I almost lost my grip and fell headlong into the waiting nettles.

My favourite obstacle was, contrary to its disturbing name, the Death Plunge. This involved walking the plank, plunging into the lake below, and swimming to shore – tremendous fun. The obstacle I had most feared, the Underwater Tunnels, had been replaced this year with some simple log ducking, which was both a relief and a letdown.

I was thankful for my small stature on several occasions. The aforementioned Torture Tunnels were agony for the legions of large, muscular men dragging themselves on their bellies through a very confined space, but relatively easy for anyone who could fit through on their hands and knees (I even managed to avoid the electric shocks). Ditto the crawls through tyres and under barbed wire.

A lake-based log carry and a rafting challenge are unique to the summer event. Some competitors were shivering thanks to the prolonged immersion in the cold water, but I’d taken up kayaking as part of my training and become accustomed to it, which was a big help.

On my second circuit of the assault course the runners thinned dramatically, leading me to conclude that either a) a lot of people had dropped out, b) a lot of people had skipped the second lap, or c) I was very slow. I think it was probably a combination of all three.

I didn’t have much time to worry about it as I slogged my way towards the end, leaping up and over the Anaconda as I went. There was just time for one more crippling hill climb, one more slide in the mud, and one more soaking in filth before I rounded the corner and made a break for the finish line. The relief was immense, but so was the sense of achievement. Yohimbé!

My top tips for Nettle Warrior

Train harder than you need to. I had no ambitions beyond completing the event without injury, but I trained hard: boxing, climbing, kayaking, running, cycling, strength training, yoga, team sports … This made the event itself pretty easy, and dramatically sped up my recovery.

Work on your balance, grip and core strength. You’ll need them all for the assault course.

Enter with a friend or a group. I was on my own, thinking that I wouldn’t want to hold someone back, or be held back myself. In actual fact, the bottlenecks mean it’s easier to stay together than to go it alone. Unless you’re ultra-competitive, it’s more of a fun challenge than a race, and most things are more fun with two.

Plan ahead. If you do want to compete with the frontrunners, pay extra for a better start position. Failing that, get fit enough to sprint the first section of the run to overtake the crowds. By the time you get to the slaloms, it’s too late.

Wear gloves. This was a piece of last-minute advice kindly emailed to me by reader Chris Pile. I opted for fingerless cycling gloves and they were invaluable. Otherwise, as Chris pointed out, “The wet ropes will rip up your bare hands.” Ouch.

Take a supporter. Supporters can get close to the action, so they can ply you with jelly babies and sports drinks when you need them, and take lots of embarrassing pictures.

Have fun! Nettle Warrior allows you to be a kid again: you get wet and muddy, feel unfathomably proud of yourself, and go to bed tired but happy. What could be better?

Over to you

I’m really interested to hear how my experience of Nettle Warrior tallied with that of other competitors. Did you compete in this year’s event? How was it for you? Perhaps you’ve done it in past years, or maybe you’ve braved the January version?

I’m also looking for a new fitness challenge, preferably one that combines pain with fun, rather than anything deadly serious – think Total Wipeout or Gladiators, not the Marathon des Sables. Any suggestions will be gratefully received.

The best pictures from Nettle Warrior 2010, from men in thongs climbing walls to Smurfs taking a mudbath

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If you are going to become a base jumper, it’s best to become a very good one

To most of us a building might be a thing of beauty, or a monstrous carbuncle and an excuse to meddle. Or something to be indifferent about – just somewhere with an inside to live in or work in. For Dan Witchalls, a building is a potential launching pad, because he is one of The Men Who Jump off Buildings (Channel 4).

He gets up in the middle of the night, leaving the warmth of his nice Danish girlfriend and sneaks out of the house. He has various ways of getting into places: subterfuge; climbing; disguises; sometimes simply paying off a resident or taking a room if it’s a hotel. Once inside, he works his way to the top, out on to the roof, and then he leaps off, freefalling for a few seconds, before opening his parachute. It’s called base jumping and it makes no sense at all but is somehow absolutely beautiful – as is this film.

Dan, like a lot of adrenaline loons, isn’t the best at putting the experience into words. He admits it can be hard getting out of bed in the middle of the night, but says: “If I do get up, and go out and do the jump, I’m glad.”

“Why?” asks his mum.

“Because I am.”

“But why?”

“Because it’s what I do.”

Brilliant, thanks Dan. His poor mum: are there any words a mother wants to to hear less than: “Mum, I’ve taken up base jumping”? It’s like: “Mum, check out my powerful new motorbike” only 10,000 times worse because base jumping is basically Russian roulette disguised as extreme sport.

Dan has a friend, Ian Richardson, who is better at explaining things, such as the close bond base-jumping buddies form. “You share incredibly intense moments, things that you don’t experience in normal friendships,” he says. Together they’ve jumped off some of London’s best known landmarks – Centrepoint, the Shell building, Trellick Tower, Wembley Stadium. Nelson’s column is my favourite. “I see no ships,” one of them says, standing next to the great man, before making the plunge. It’s nice to have something swooping down from the sky in Trafalgar Square, now they’ve got rid of the pigeons. (Do not feed the base jumpers.) Then they run off giggling like naughty schoolboys to avoid being apprehended by the law.

Ian’s problem is that, while he might be better at the words than Dan, he is less good at the jumping. One day his parachute opens the wrong way around, and he comes down facing the building, bashing his head into it all the way down, like a woodpecker on fast rewind. That was in Benidorm; I guess high-rise resorts are a base jumper’s dream holiday destination.

He gets away with that one, with a lot of broken bones – which is luckier than Dan’s first partner, who was killed. Base-jumping partnerships don’t last long. Ian spends a lot of time mending, and then Dan takes him on holiday again, to Switzerland, to jump off cliffs (note to self: if a man called Dan with a pack on his back and a cheeky grin ever asks me on holiday with him, I’m busy).

Cliffs can be tricky, because they don’t always go straight down, so you have to fly outwards, too. And guess what, Ian gets it wrong for the second time, ends up a bag of broken bones all over again, alive but only just. Ian! Think about it, man: do you think there might be a lesson to be learned here? You’re just not very good at it, and base jumping is not a good thing to be not very good at. Stop it, now, before it’s too late. Please.

In a road-rage incident between a driver of a Porsche and the rider of a bicycle, the correct person to side with is the cyclist, obviously, regardless of what actually happened. A Porsche driver is a cock, fact. So why am I on his side in Californication (Fiver)? Because he’s David Duchovny’s character Hank Moody. And although caustic Hank – a writer who’s dried up up there, but not down there, if you know what I’m saying – is a bit of a cock, there’s also something immensely attractive about him. The ladies certainly seem to think so, and fall over each other trying to get into bed with him, even though he sometimes nods off on the job.

If you haven’t got into Californication, now starting its third series, you should give it a whirl. It’s sharp, funny, sexy, wicked and the characters – especially Hank – have proper depth. Plus it’s made a lot of good people – Christian groups etc – very cross. What’s not to like?

Freeze Festival is back once again this year for the third year running. Taking place at London’s Battersea Power Station on October 29th – 31st.Its an amazing snow sports and music festival featuring the best skiers and snowboarders who compete on a specially erected 32m high, 100m long real snow ramp. Riders including Olympic medalists Danny Kass, Peetu Piiroinen and Scotty Lago compete in the extremepie/News/~4/BVmJfj37Xk8″ height=”1″ width=”1″ />

Keep your eyes peeled out for the Globe X G Shock Collection coming soon to extremepie.com.Globe are doing this awesome collaboration with G Shock watches where you can get your hands on the G-Shock DW5600GLB-7 Watch in a classic white body and white casing with contrasting black screen and gold detail, with a High-Top Shoe and Cap. The Limited edition G-Shock x Globe Collaboration is being extremepie/News/~4/YEXKtnP3anU” height=”1″ width=”1″ />

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A sociologist plans to swim the Channel as she studies people’s motivation for taking up extreme sports

Few academics plan to immerse themselves in their subject matter quite as literally as Dr Karen Throsby, a sociologist from Warwick University. Next month, she plans to swim the Channel as part of a project sub-titled “Embodiment and identity in an extreme sporting culture”.

Her research aims to explore what motivates people to engage in an extreme sports such as Channel swimming. She has funding from the Economic and Social Research Council for two and a half years, towards the end of which she hopes to write a book that will reach out beyond the purely academic market to tap into the post-Olympic debate on the motivation to take part in sport.

“Swimming is a big part of the Olympic action plan,” she says. “But I want to look at the really positive things that people can get out of physical activity and move away from the current obsession with seeing it simply as a way of reducing bodyweight.” In fact, as part of her preparation for ploughing across the 21 miles of chilly, turbulent tides that separate Dover from Calais, she has had to put on a stone in weight. “I simply ate more of what I normally eat and then maintained that weight,” she says.

Throsby wants her research to question orthodox ideas about what counts as a sporting body in contemporary society. And the body she is using to explore those issues is her own. Her training regime has involved swimming around Jersey in 10 and a half hours, as well as ploughing up and down Coventry’s Olympic-length swimming pool, just down the road from the university. Not surprisingly, perhaps, her shoulder and neck muscles have “bulked up”, as she puts it, “in ways that are counter-normative for women but not for men”.

Throsby, 42, has always been interested in gender issues and is fascinated by the reaction of friends whom she hasn’t seen for a while when they remark about her evident upper-body strength. Does that bother her? “In some ways it does. It’s not entirely comfortable to know that you’re being looked at critically. On the other hand, this is part of an experiment purposefully to change one’s body while remaining in control. Women usually make those changes in the context of the socially accepted ideal of what we should look like.” And that is not all the result of celebrity culture and glossy mags. “Medically, we’re all supposed to be slimming down. But I have a politicised view of body size and I find the link between thinness and health very troubling. The promotion of physical activity primarily as a way of losing weight is the route to shame, self-hatred and guilt.”

These issues will be explored in an academic paper to be published roughly six months after her cross-Channel swim.

The success rate of the Dover-Calais swim is between 60 and 65%. Only slightly more than 1,000 people have completed the 21 miles since Captain Matthew Webb, smeared in porpoise oil, took the first epic plunge back in 1875. That is fewer people than those who have climbed Everest since it was first conquered in 1953.

Should Throsby join their ranks, it will add lustre to what she calls her “auto-ethnography”. But the research project won’t end there. “The second part will be a more conventional study of the community that surrounds an extreme sporting culture,” she explains. “By looking at the obsessive end of sport we can learn about motivation, and that could be transferable to those who want a much more reasonable and moderate engagement with physical activity.”

Aside from the Channel swimmers, there is an online community all over the world of long-distance swimmers training for stretches of water such as the Catalina Channel in California. This is comparable in length to the Channel, but not as tidal. “Our Channel still has an iconic status among marathon swimmers because of the challenges it poses,” she says.

At the moment, Throsby is spending every weekend with the Kent-based community of groups who get together to train in Dover Harbour. “I shall be interviewing them at length, but it’s already very clear that their motivations vary. Some are doing it for adventure, others because they enjoy a challenge. Then there are those who like to break records, raise funds for charity or simply improve their health and well-being.”

Throsby will also be talking to the wider community, such as the trainers, swimmers’ families and the boat pilots who offer guidance, support for swimmers in difficulty and sustenance every half hour or so: an energy drink, banana and – in her case – jelly babies. “Finally,” she says, “there are the volunteers who come to the harbour every weekend to give us food, offer encouragement and look after our shoes while we’re away.”

The aquatic sociologist insists that swimming long distances is relaxing and “empties the mind”. She knows that in her own case, however, she is going to have to fill that mind quickly. Once the swimming is over, the writing has to start in earnest.

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North Yorkshire cleared in health and safety trial after Joe Lister, 14, died in Manchester Hole cave on school trip

A local authority was today found not guilty of breaching health and safety laws after a 14-year-old schoolboy died on a caving trip.

Joe Lister drowned when water swept through Manchester Hole cave in the Yorkshire Dales during a Tadcaster grammar school trip in November 2005.

North Yorkshire county council, which owns and operates the outdoor education centre involved in the potholing trip, was cleared of two charges of failing to ensure the health and safety of staff and others.

A jury at Leeds crown court took about nine hours to reach the not guilty verdicts.

Joe, from Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, was one of 10 pupils and three adults taking part in the caving trip organised by the Bewerley Park Centre.

The group got into difficulties when water in the cave began rising rapidly, forcing them to swim for safety through a tunnel known as the Crawl – which is 12 metres (just under 40ft) long and less than one metre (3.28ft) high at its lowest point.

Joe drowned in the cave and was later found by a rescuer with his head torch still on but without his wellington boots.

North Yorkshire county council was charged with two counts under the Health and Safety at Work Act.

Mr Justice Wilkie said: “In the end, the jury has concluded that there was nothing which the North Yorkshire county council could reasonably have done to have avoided what happened.

“It is right and proper that they should have reached such a conclusion.

“I trust, however, that this will not be regarded as a reason for any complacency or self-congratulation by those involved in organising and delivering these activities.

“For the one thing this case has taught is that, however great the expertise, and however easy the cave, they can be unpredictable and dangerous.”

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I had to perform a U-turn to accomplish the hardest task I have ever faced. And a volte-face is our only hope of solving climate change

On 15 July 2007, I swam across an open patch of sea at the North Pole to highlight the melting of the Arctic sea ice. Three years later, I remember it as if it were yesterday. I recall walking to the edge of the sea and thinking: I’ve never seen anything so frightening in my life. There were giant chunks of ice in the water, which was –1.7C (29F) and utterly black.

If things go pear-shaped now, I thought, how long would it take for my frozen body to sink the 4.2km to the seabed? And then I realised that was perhaps the single worst thought one could have before attempting a symbolic 1km swim wearing nothing but a pair of Speedos. I was shaken to the core, terrified.

After thousands of hours of planning and training, the only way I could complete the swim that lured me to the northernmost point of the world was committing 100%. Nothing is more powerful than a made-up mind. I disappeared inside my head and my blood simmered. After listening to some rousing music (everything from Verdi to P Diddy) to get myself into the right state of mind, I threw myself into the water and swam with as much speed and aggression as my body could muster.

When I emerged 1km later from the icy water, I’ll never forget looking down at my fingers. They had swollen to the size of sausages. The majority of the human body is water and when water freezes, it expands. The cells in my fingers had frozen, swollen and burst. I had never felt anything so excruciating. My nerve cells were so badly damaged it was four months before I could feel my hands again. I resolved never to do another cold water swim.

Then last year I learned about the melting of the glaciers in the Himalayas and Hindu Kush mountains. As nearly 2 billion people – approximately one in three people on the planet – rely on drinking or irrigation water from these glaciers, I decided it was time to emerge from retirement for another symbolic swim – this time in a glacial lake under the summit of Mount Everest. Considering the potential for instability in regions facing rapidly increasing populations twinned with decreasing natural resources, I returned to training.

What made this swim particularly difficult is that this year, of all years, local authorities mounted a large operation to remove the bodies of climbers who lost their lives on the mountain. So there I was – at 5.3km above sea level, attempting something no one has ever tried before while suffering a vicious case of altitude sickness – and frozen bodies are coming past me as I slowly shuffle higher and higher. To say the least, it is unsettling being reminded of your mortality.

In late May, I reached Lake Pumori, adjacent to the Khumbu Glacier on Everest, and began to prepare mentally to launch myself into a swim. I cranked up P Diddy, glared across the water, fixed my mind on the opposite side of the lake and dived in. At 2C (36F), the water was slightly warmer than at the North Pole but, up in the heavens at the icy tip of the world, breathing is very difficult. Within seconds, I was in trouble – gasping, choking, then vomiting. Then I momentarily went under. The first time I managed to recover easily by pushing myself off the bottom of the shallow lake, but when it happened again I was exhausted and overcome with panic. Some people say that drowning is the most peaceful death. Bollocks.

After it happened a third time, I flapped myself to the edge of the lake. My team mercifully lifted me out, moving my chilled body as quickly down the mountain as they could. That evening, we gathered for a debriefing on what had gone awry and how we could try and fix it. My team gave it to me straight, with team leader Maj-Gen Tim Toyne Sewell deciding on a radical tactical shift.

They talk about SAS standing for speed, aggression and surprise. When I left the regiment, I took that philosophy with me, and it was crucial in my swims in Antarctica, down the Thames, across the Maldives, and across the North Pole.

But my team told me to completely forget the past. Every single thing I had learned in 23 years of swimming I had to forget, he told me, and everything I had learned about speed and aggression as a reservist in the Special Air Service I should ignore. Instead of swimming fast, I had to swim as slowly as possible; instead of the crawl, I had to swim breaststroke; and instead of adopting an aggressive attitude, I needed humility. “You can’t bully Mount Everest,” the Major-General said.

Two days later, on 22 May, we climbed up the mountain as slowly as possible and gathered at the lake, where I lay down on a rock and looked up at the summit of Everest. Humbled, I focused on the glaciers and tried to calm myself in the face of my fear. If I went too slowly, I’d die of cold; too quickly and I’d hyperventilate and drown. I then stood, stepped quietly into the water and swam a measured breaststroke across the expanse towards the spot on the other shore where my team awaited, 1km away. Twenty-three minutes later, I arrived.

I learned two basic lessons on Everest. First, just because something has worked in the past does not mean it will worktoday. Second, different challenges require different mindsets. Now, before I do anything, I ask myself what type of mindset I require to successfully complete the task.

Climate change is the Everest of all problems, the thorniest challenge facing humankind. Just because we have lived in a certain way for so long, and we have consumed the way we have for so long, and populated the earth the way we have for so long, doesn’t mean the decisions we’ve made in the past will work today. All the warning signs are there. When I was born, the world’s population was 3.5 billion. There are now 6.8 billion people on the planet. By 2050, that’s expected to rise to 9.4 billion. What’s more, the Earth’s resources aren’t growing; they’re decreasing – and rapidly.

Last week, I spoke in Oxford at Ted, the “Ideas Worth Spreading” conference, and challenged the audience to consider what radical tactical shift they will take. This may look different for each of us – as world leaders, corporate decision-makers, parents, students or otherwise – as we consider the way we engage with our environment. How do we ensure a healthy, sustainable and peaceful world – a world in which our children have a future?

Moving forward, we must discover our own radical tactical shifts, whether they be in our homes, in our workplaces, in our communities, our countries or our world. Dispense with the assumptions and arrogance of yesterday. Take that step, I said, and commit 100% to doing it. I hope, in some small way, that my swim at the top of the world, which changed me, demonstrates that nothing is impossible. With care and collaboration, it is possible to engage in a discourse of humility and to move beyond dialogue to action.

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• Oh Eun-sun, 44, crawls to peak of Annapurna for world record
• Spanish rival questions whether earlier summit was reached

A South Korean mountaineer today claimed victory in a bitterly fought race with a Spanish climber to become the first woman to reach the top of the world’s 14 highest mountains.

Millions of South Koreans gathered around TV sets to watch Oh Eun-sun waving a national flag after crawling to the summit of Annapurna in Nepal.

“Thank you fellow Koreans for being with me throughout the whole expedition,” she told a film crew who made the climb with her to broadcast live footage from the summit.

The mountain was the last of the 14 Himalayan mountains above 8,000m to be conquered by Oh. But as Koreans celebrated the feat, doubts remain about whether Oh reached the top of one of the other 14 peaks last year.

Her main rival in the race for the record, Edurne Pasaban from Spain, is not convinced that Oh reached the summit of Kangchenjunga, the world’s third-highest mountain, in May.

Oh is seen standing on a rock in photographs that claim to show her at the summit, but Kangchenjunga is usually covered in snow at that time of year.

One of Pasaban’s climbing team claimed rope trails left by Oh’s team ran out 200m short of the summit. Oh’s team dismissed such doubts as “malicious”.

But Elizabeth Hawley, the veteran chronicler and arbiter of Himalayan climbs, is set to list Oh’s ascent of Kangchenjunga as “disputed” in her database.

Pasaban has only one more of the 14 mountains to climb, after reaching the summit of Annapurna last month. She is in Tibet preparing to ascend the last on her list, Shisha Pangma.

Oh tried to reach the peak of Annapurna last year but turned back hundreds of metres from the summit because of bad weather.

Snow and wind also stopped her from making the trek last weekend. “I gave it up because of a sudden ominous feeling that something bad would happen to either me or my peers, including the sherpas, on my way back to base camp,” she told the Korea Times newspaper.

Nineteen men have climbed all 14 peaks above 8,000m. Reinhold Messner from Italy set the record when he claimed all 14 between 1970 and 1986.

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Expert who knew terrain well tells court he has never seen conditions change as dramatically as on day teenager drowned

A caving instructor broke down in tears today as he told a court how he lost hold of a schoolboy while struggling to escape from a flooded pothole.

Tony Boyle, whose party was caught by rapidly rising, icy water which drowned the student, 14-year-old Joe Lister, said that he had almost lost consciousness as he forced his way to the surface through a passage only 1 metre high.

He told Leeds crown court that he had never seen anything like the sudden change in conditions that turned a straightforward adventure outing into a trap. The weather had been dry for several days before the tragedy in November 2005, he said, although there had been substantial rainfall before that.

The group of three adults and 10 children had squeezed down the 12-metre crawl tunnel at Manchester Hole, in the Yorkshire Dales, and were resting in a bigger section when the situation changed dramatically.

Boyle, an experienced instructor at Bewerley Park centre near Pateley Bridge, North Yorkshire, told the jury: “The water was rising very rapidly. It came up to the roof while I was there.

“I was in a very small space under water and had two students with me. I tried to get them through with me, I had hold of them and we tried to force our way through. I was starting to lose consciousness and I unfortunately let go.

“I was very disorientated and close to drowning myself.”

The body of Joe Lister, from Tadcaster in North Yorkshire, was later found by a cave rescue team.

The jury is hearing a health and safety executive case against North Yorkshire county council, which runs Bewerley Park and denies ensuring the health and safety of staff and visitors.

Boyle said that after reaching the top of the tunnel, he pulled other members of the party out and initially thought that everyone was safe. When a headcount revealed Lister’s absence, he thought of plunging back down but decided that it was too dangerous.

“If I’d got back through I don’t think I could have brought Joe back with me. We could have got trapped, leaving the rest of the group stranded,” he said.

Asked by Robert Smith QC, defending, if he had ever encountered similar conditions, he said “never”. He told the jury that he had been “happy and reassured” by water levels before the tragedy, and could not understand how the sudden rise had happened.

Manchester Hole is part of a warren of caves in the limestone of the dales, scoured out by underground streams whose courses can be lengthy and take hours to pass on rainfall from the ground above.

The case continues.

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Join us in congratulating Josh Kerr for claiming victory at the summer round of innersection. Beating John John Florence, Clay Marzo and Ozzy Wright in some tough competition with his mental airs and insane tube rides.Josh Kerr Airstrike attempts from Kustom Airstrike on Vimeo.And look out for new film ‘The Kerrazy Kronicles’ coming out in october.The ‘KERRAZY KRONICLES’ movie trailer from extremepie/News/~4/Ti_h6wRauVQ” height=”1″ width=”1″ />

Stretch your summer with the Billabong Tour. An event which is coming to Bournemouth this week on the 29th July!!Enjoy some surfing, wakeboarding, skating, demos with the professionals, video premieres, BBQ’S, parties, giveaways, signing sessions and lots more.But don’t panic if you can’t make Bournemouth the tour will be finishing up in France on the following dates.Aug 1st: La Torche, Twenty extremepie/News/~4/GDzJfuXXw9g” height=”1″ width=”1″ />

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