Urban Thrillseeking (October '11)

After everything, this is what it had come to. It was an otherwise beautiful sunny Saturday morning in Sydney, and I was standing on the edge of a 28 story building looking down at the pavement. A crowd of nervous onlookers stood down on the street behind the yellow tape, looking back up, wondering how this was going to end. It didn't matter now. I was committed. Turning my back on them, I let my body fall back over the precipice.

And that's when I felt the full weight of the rope falling away beneath me. But lets step back onto the edge and look back at how I found myself here.

I work in the tower next door - my office looks over the top of this building and out over Circular Quay; the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House - The coming and going ferries. And roughly twelve months earlier I stood up there staring down at person after person abseiling down the AMP building below on a Friday morning. They were raising money and awareness for the Sir David Martin Foundation, a cause I'd only learned about a few weeks earlier - not long enough, I had judged, to raise the $1500 required to qualify for the jump. Next year, I thought. Next year.

And so six months later I found myself in the same office with three colleagues, thirty box's of fundraising chocolates, a few kilos of sausages and an eager workplace looking to lighten their wallets proportional to extending their waistline. $6000 for the four of us seemed like such a daunting task for someone who'd never tried fundraising before.

But now we were right there in the moment, leaning back into the first step downwards. It's all easy after that, with the rope taut holding your weight. Standing on the edge with the rope slack, holding your own balance in the wind - it feels like you could easily fall to your death, no matter how much you know you're shackled to the building. It's the same feeling I experience on the Auckland Sky Tower in 2010.

 Its a small building by today's standards, but still reaches some hundred or so meters into the sky. And that much rope, if you could throw it that far, probably weighs more than the cow you're trying to lasso. So each step from the top could only be made by lifting all that mass up so the next foot of rope could slide cleanly through the whale-tail at my waist. A few more steps and I stopped to look around.

Once the tallest building in the Sydney skyline, the AMP building at circular quay more closely resembles an over sized monument to the 60's bronze brown they coloured everything in those days. Much like the lino on your Grandma's kitchen floor. The sides are a rough granite-white stone, and from my position perched at about the 26th floor, I could look up Young street to the flash new CBus building, or out over Circular Quay station and over the water. I had a look up, and a look down, tried to spot the family who were no doubt much more concerned than I was right now.

Pushing away from the wall, and letting a length of rope slide through the rig induces a sense of exhilaration and freedom you can only find in stepping this far out of the norm. On this much rope, it was surprisingly easy to put several meters between me and the wall, searching for the moment where your motion slowed and that split second when you weren't moving away or back to the wall. Hanging free in the abyss between the morning sun and the gentle breeze. My knees bent to take the speed out of my return to the wall, and pushed back for the next slide.

Time passes incredibly quickly that way, and soon I was pushing out over the third floor balcony and onto the lower wall. By this stage the rope would pass freely if you let it, and I smoothly lowered straight down to the ground.