Protecting Oneself From Oneself

Many years ago the teenaged version of myself particularly enjoyed the collectible card based game “Magic: The Gathering”. As I found myself nostalgically discussing this with a friend today I noted that a facet of the appeal resulted from the many-layered experience. Now, as I write this paragliding-centric piece that has been in my backlog for some time, I find myself wondering how the parallels between these two hobbies explain (in part) my interest in both.

With Magic, unlike games such as Chess, there are (at least) four layers involved: the universe of cards, your own personal collection, your decks constructed therefrom, and the actual competition. Further complicating matters include: the global community of players, the local community of players, the evolving rules of the game, the available formats of play, and the emergent strategies.

Although, as you will sometimes hear, “you can teach any monkey to fly”, to embrace piloting and stay in the game over the long-haul involves successfully navigating all of a large number of facets which parallel the aforementioned ones. Those facets are numerous but today we focus on a collection of techniques intended to prevent bad decision making before the opportunity and temptation even arises and to dampen the severity of bad outcomes when they inevitably occur.

So much of The Game is decided long before one plays it. By “shifting security left” we may find many opportunities to have a calm and rational present version of ourselves remove high pressure consequential decisions from stressed and irrational future versions of ourselves. The risks and techniques, meanwhile, fall into a few themes.

Make The Right Choice Also Be The Lazy Choice

One can often paraglide, if one so chooses, with minimal physical exertion or hardship, which makes matters all the more dangerous when such challenges do sneak their way into the experience in ways for which we are ill prepared. One of the most perilous ways we can engage with paragliding takes form in launch and landing decisions centered on a desire to avoid being hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, tired, stranded, or generally inconvenienced. You can knock a huge number of those items off the list just by bringing an insulated camelbak full of water (into which you may have dropped an electrolyte tablet) and stuffed with snacks (transferred to more accessible places just before launch) while also eating, drinking, and caffeinating (pro-tip: slow-release gel capsule) beforehand like you are going into battle. Add some trekking poles, a headlamp, some mosquito wipes, and sanitary wipes to your kit and you’ll be far more comfortable hiking down from a sketchy launch or choosing a relatively safe but inconvenient landing location. Insist on clear communications about logistics for drive-up sites so you don’t opt for a dangerous launch instead of an easy drive-down. Place some damp neck gaiters between the bladder and insulation of your camelbak during warm months and always dress in layers so you’ll be ready for the relative temperature extremes of launch, cloudbase, and landing such that you make well-timed and well-reasoned decisions instead of rushed and/or fatigued ones.

If You’re Gonna Be Dumb Then You Gotta Be Tough

If you’re very choosy and conservative about how you engage with the sport, and your luck always holds, then maybe you don’t need to be physically fit for paragliding and maybe auxiliary gear and training aren’t that important. Luck, however, is among our most unreliable friends. What happens if you find yourself unexpectedly in really active air, or scratching along complex terrain, or dealing with climates of extreme temperature and/or oxygen content, or you unintentionally land out in a harsh remote location, or you land hard enough that serious injury is a real possibility? What if, god forbid, multiple of these adversities come at you simultaneously? Your best defense consists of good decision making that keeps you out of bad situations and a big part of that hinges on a calm mind that in turn depends on a brain that always has the sugar, water, and oxygen it needs, matters that hinge not just on adequate inputs but also efficient machinery. And when things start to go wrong, an inevitability for all pilots of any ambition, robust brain function matters even more. And if things go so wrong that you do go splat then the more solidly built and agile you are the kinder physics will be about distributing the violence through both space and time. And if the math is violent enough that you do end up a bit broken then physical fitness, psychological toughness, and medical readiness (both gear and training) can lower the tier of awfulness that you will be navigating.

Take Difficult Decisions Away From Your Future Self

If you are going to invest in traveling to paraglide, then go for long enough that you don’t fall prey to The Scarcity Trap, and perhaps also choose destinations where there exist fun weather day activities, all with an eye toward making it easy to keep your feet on the ground during sketchy days. Level up your forecasting skills such that you fold bad hands before investing several hours of your day or booking lodging for a regional jaunt so you don’t make a subsequent decision driven by The Sunk Costs Fallacy. If your time margins for making a flight are razor-thin then consider just aborting the outing early and doing something else so that you’re not courting disaster with air too punchy for your skills because the day has turned on too much or with conditions that have become katabatic because the day has turned off. When choosing your flying companions, select ones that inspire you without pressuring you, and surround yourself with people who care more about their friends getting home safely than being able to tell a great story. If you are going to film your adventures, then commit to sharing and analyzing your worst moments, not just celebrating your self-aggrandizing highlights reel, such that your hurt pride may serve as as strong a back pressure on bad decision making as a broken bone. And if you are going to do things where severe bodily injury in inconvenient locations is a real possibility, then dial back your risk taking accordingly and always purchase appropriate insurance so that you can confidently slap the SOS button on your satellite device to get the cavalry on the way immediately when things go sideways instead of wavering because of the fear of crushing medical bills.

Introspect On Your Mind State Across All Timescales

At a distance one may struggle to discern between persistence and stubbornness. Persistence looks like continuing to show up over time while gradually racking up progress against skills and goals. Stubbornness looks like trying to fly the day you wanted instead of the day you got and may get you maimed or killed. Every time you strap into your gear and launch you have decided to gamble all future flights on this one flight and so it had better be a good bet. You only have to be really wrong just once to ruin everything. Consider developing rules that look like a minimum number of hours of sleep or a maximum number of mistakes on your way to launch triggering a non-negotiable no-go decision. If you find on the run-up to launch a mind growing cloudy with frustration, anxiety, inflexibility, jealously, or entitlement, then ask yourself if this the person you want as your pilot and think about putting your wing back in the bag.

Currency protects us, complacency kills us, and the two naturally correlate. Your technique benefits from regular practice but that same consistency may engender sloppy or aggressive decision making. Checklists and rules-based decision making may protect us from certain classes of errors but only to the degree that we have the discipline to adhere to them which may degrade when a run of bad behavior coincides with good luck. Continual exposure to a given kind of activity causes our hedonic set point to drift ever upward which results in our accepting increasingly objectively dangerous situations in exchange for the same subjective amount of pleasure. Many great flights are the result of terrible decisions which creates a perverse feedback loop. How to counter these risks? It’s simple (not the same as easy) — regularly take some time away from the thing you love at various timescales. This allows us to lower our hedonic set point, reaffirm our safety principles, and cultivate a more diverse (and thus fault tolerant) collection of interests and relationships.

Respect the complexity and stickiness of trauma and act accordingly. Flying offers us a magical way to go from feeling okay to good or from good to great. It also offers us an incredibly dangerous way to attempt to dig out from feeling bad. If you have had a bad paragliding experience then you might be thinking in terms of “getting back on the horse” which done right can be healthy but done wrong can result in going from a bad outcome to a disastrous one because you rushed things owing to a feeling that you had something to prove to yourself or others. When you do get back on the horse, consider opting for a dramatically scaled back experience, keeping in mind that a relatively simple and safe flight is all you need to break a slump and a more complex flight can come later when you have more thoroughly healed. Ponder, as well, how much a fear injury can resemble a physical injury, noting that your brain might need as much time to knit itself back together as wounded skin or a broken bone, the implication being that time off may simply be a requirement of healing as opposed to a demonstration of cowardice and a lack of commitment. And know that paragliding mishaps represent only one of many kinds of trauma that can impact our ability to pilot our aircraft sensibly.

Lastly, beware big breakthroughs. Paragliding represents an incredibly complex endeavor comprising countless sub-skills which may evolve independently and interact unpredictably. When you have a big breakthrough in some area, certainly take the time to celebrate it, and by all means get excited about the new opportunities afforded you, but also step back and ponder how this changes your personal risk landscape. If paragliding were an adventure role playing game on a computer then you might get notifications that looked like “skill unlocked — fifty additional quests available; ten new ways to die”. Paragliding offers a hugely multi-variable equation, you can only handle a subset of values for any given variable, you can handle an even smaller set of values for a given variable when combined with other variable states, and more alarmingly still you don’t even know all the variables. So every time you have a big breakthrough with one of those sub-skills/variables, think about how you can play with the new configurations of that one aspect while dialing back the aggressiveness on other ones, creating for yourself margins to survive being surprised by bad variable interactions that were not previously available to you. In data science terms, our evolution as paraglider pilots comes with a huge risk of “overfitting the model”, a situation where we take enormous risks unwittingly because we over-extrapolate from our limited experiences, and an issue potentially both remedied and exacerbated by flying at more sites and in a greater variety of conditions depending on how we control subsets of variables during such experimentation.

Like Everything Else In Life Only Moreso

These lessons, at least in the abstract, don’t feel unique to paragliding, but a few factors amplify their importance in this context — there is no pause button in this game, in your worst moments you are utterly alone, the consequences of just one sufficiently bad mistake are extreme, and there are no do-overs.