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Courtesy JaNette Lefkowitz/Getty
I realized seconds into the free fall of my first tandem dive — way back in November 2001 — that this was a feeling I had to keep chasing. So 12 years ago, I quit my consulting job to skydive competitively.
Seriously, it's a legit sport that dates back to around 1930 in Russia, when jumpers aimed to land as close to a target on the ground as possible. Today, there are seven different competition disciplines, and formation skydiving — the style I often do — is scored based on the the number of formations or patterns we can repeatedly perform in a certain number of seconds, all while free falling.