There’s nothing like tackling phobias head on.  On a scale of 1-10, my fear of heights is about an 8.  Not debilitating, but if I often have to approach a sheer drop off very slowly, sometimes on my hands and knees.  Milan Kundera, Czech writer of Unbearable Lightness of Being and other great novels, once wrote:

Anyone whose goal is something higher must expect someday to suffer vertigo.  What is vertigo?  Fear of falling?  No.  Vertigo is something other than the fear of falling.  It is the voice of emptiness below us that tempts us and lures us.  It is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.  

I still remember that quote even though I read that book almost thirty years ago and even though I don’t hear voices like that.   I just fear falling.  When I was a young college grad, I (temporarily) conquered my fear of heights by skydiving; “jumping out of a perfectly good airplane” as they say.  Not sure how I pulled that off mentally.  It helped that I did it with a bunch of friends.  After several hours of instruction as to all the things that could go wrong, we took off in a small plane and leveled off at about 3,000 feet.  One at a time, the instructor had us dangle our legs out the cargo-size door of the plane, while holding onto the sides.  He then said “jump” and I, like the rest of colleagues, jumped.  There were no “tandem” jumps in those days, so it was just me and my chute, though a static line connected me to the fuselage of the plane and ensured that after the longest six seconds of my life the ripcord would be pulled.  Whether I ended up a tangled mess that would hurtle several thousand feet before pancaking into the ground, or opened my parachute for a glorious ride down, largely depended on whether I spread my arms and legs correctly, making my belly button the center of gravity and giving the chute on my back a clear path to the sky.  

That all worked out well, but fear creeps slowly back, and it’s taken things like the challenging cable-assisted climbs of our family hiking trip last summer along Alta VIa 2 trail in the Dolomite Range in northern Italy last summer to keep my fear of heights at bay.

Which leads me to the Bridger.  I’m certainly used to trail runs where the consequences of a fall can be both dramatic and painful, but I anticipate, aka fear,  that the RIdge Run will ratchet that up to 11 in Spinal Tap terms.  The adrenaline of the run will help squelch those fears, but I imagine that vertigo will be one of the many emotions I’ll be feeling it on August 13.