Resilienz

Night has not yet fallen, but with the clouds and rain in the woods south of Salzburg it is practically dark. Aaron is still walking, at a steady pace, but not like he was 80 km ago. The backpack with his paraglider inside is relatively light, but after ten hours walking, it’s starting to weigh him down. “Damn weather”, he mumbles to himself. “Damn rain, and damn bad luck”. Thunderstorms rumble in the distance, for an instant a flash in the sky outlines the pyramid shaped Hochalmspitze peak, both fascinating and terrible. Only a few kilometres left till Aaron can rest for a bit. It would have been a totally different story if he had been able to fly. He would have been light and precise, he could have flown all the way from the take-off point, flying over the Salzburg Alps instead of struggling overland. Not that this kind of flying is in any way relaxing. Quite the opposite. These are strange valleys, the air forms complicated unforeseeable currents, and thermals don’t last as long as you would like them to, or else are too weak. Without any special magical powers, you end up being blown like a leaf carried on an autumn breeze. No, it is not a relaxing undertaking, but that’s another story – 80 km is a long way to walk in the pouring rain.

“There you go, as if that weren’t enough even, now my knee is bothering me”. Aaron grits his teeth, trying to ignore the persistent pain which has begun to gnaw at his joints. Probably his meniscus. But his prospects were good, in fact, they were excellent. A great season, extremely fit, then his victory in the Paragliding World Cup Superfinal, and to finish everything off his amazing performance at the Leatherman Prologue, the ascent and descent of Zwölferhorn mountain which preceded the X-Alps. Aaron crossed the finishing line first, together with Sebastian Huber. They crossed the finishing line holding hands together, one hour and fifty-three minutes after the start gun, in one of those scenes that shows true sportsmanship. I wonder where Sebastian is now. I wonder how wet he’s getting. This is the Red Bull X-Alps, one of the toughest adventure races in the world – from Salzburg to the Principality of Monaco, a thousand kilometres as the crow flies across the entire Alps. The only means of transport: your legs and a paraglider. It is a legendary race, one of those where simply reaching the finishing line is a huge achievement. Aaron has already achieved that. In 2013, he came seventh. In 2015, sixth. This year, well, his dream is to win. While he stubbornly continues to place one step in front of another, in spite of the pain, Aaron thinks of all the hard work he has put in just to get to this stage. Running and flying, for hours and hours, and the litres of sweat, just to be in with a chance of a podium position. His knee is deteriorating, as is the weather, and his spirits. It’s difficult to stay calm when everything is going so badly. On the second day of the competition things seem to improve. Finally, it’s flyable. Aaron takes off with a limp, he lands, grits his teeth and walks for hours, takes off and lands again. These irregular landings are doing his knee no good, and walking becomes agony, especially on asphalt. Should he quit, just give up? No, Aaron won’t even think about it. He has a dream, and it is an important dream. He can’t let it slip away. He discusses it with his team. All of them, from his tactical expert to his physio, advise him to quit. They tell him that he has fought like a lion, but enough is enough. Aaron almost feels like crying, and not just from the pain he’s in. But he grits his teeth, and digs deep, tapping into his last reserves of energy, the kind you don’t know you have until you’ve reached your limit. He does not quit. It’s the third day, and he is still in the competition. He clocks up another seventeen kilometres on foot and almost three hundred in the sky, but his knee unfortunately does not improve in spite of the treatment he’s received. It’s the fifth of July, and the fourth day of the race: 174 kilometres of flight, which is too little, so he must negotiate forty km on foot. And that’s too far in this state. It’s over. Worn out by exhaustion and pain, Aaron quits the race.

Imagine you no longer have a dream. Imagine that all the hard work, sweat and tears, in pursuit of this dream were in vain. The warm feelings of success and of achievement, do not materialise as you’d imagined. Instead, you are faced with utter disappointment. It’s easy to give up. It’s easy to tell everybody to go to hell. But imagine having a rare quality. Psychologists call it “resilience”. This means that you’re a bit like a rubber ball: as you hit the floor, you bounce back. “Resilience” means that you can transform that fall into new energy that shoots you up high. Not everyone has it, but Aaron does. He spends the summer months between physio and new training sessions to get fit. Gradually, building up the intensity and duration. Aaron is back on his feet, his knee is working again, and on the eighth of September in Lienz, Austria, it’s time for the Red Bull Dolomitenmann. This is an extremely tough team relay race: trail running, paragliding, mountain biking, kayaking. “Why not?”, Aaron thinks to himself. The paragliding section is very difficult. When your team runner arrives, passing you the relay baton, you have to set off running. Downhill fast from the Kühbodentörl peak, all the way to the take-off point. You have to fly quickly, but precisely… very precisely. There is a midway landing, another running section, then a second flight, all the way down to the Lienz stadium. Then the baton is passed on once again. Aaron does not think about resilience when he sets off. He doesn’t think about it when he takes off, not even as he flies down fast as a falcon swooping down the slopes of the Kühbodentörl, skimming the tips of the pine trees. After all, he thinks, life is beautiful because it is hard. He knows that it is not the end result that bring the greatest satisfaction, but the road you’ve taken to reach it. He thinks to himself, there are very few things that make his heart beat in quite the same way as it does when he has the wind in his face. He is flying brilliantly, as if everything was clearly mapped out for him in the air. He lands, runs, passes the baton.

The race carries on, along trails and through the air. But Aaron Durogati has already won. Because, nothing could stop him from bouncing back. And also, because his time was the fastest time in the Dolomitenmann race. It’s first place on the podium for him. Paul pulls the window down. “Hey, Ken!” The shaggy Alaskan turns around, and stares at the Austrian. It could be the light of dawn, but he sees something more than a simple pilot, and something more than an adventurer.He sees a man who had no fear to take a new road, to follow a dream, to understand the true spirit of Alaska, beyond the rhetoric of the last frontier. He sees someone who flies to fly, someone for which air is not only what your wings, or your sail fly across. Someone for which the never ending kilometers of tundra, lakes and mountains are not a distance to merely fly across, but a space in which to express oneself.

It could be the light of dawn, but Ken is almost touched by the thought. “Ken, I wanted to say…no, forget it. Thanks, you are awesome, see you in four days. Buy some beer!” Ken lifts his thumb. Paul turns on the engine, taking off with elegant precision from the narrow strip which by now he calls air field. He gains height, while the intense morning light starts to caress Seward’s Folly. Four hours later his plane is parked on the edge of a nameless valley, somewhere east of Peter’s Dome. Paul is running fast; behind him the paraglider inflates, and his feet lose contact with the ground beneath. Around him a never ending expanse of new and incredible places, there is no sign of a person, a house, or a trail. “Flying to fly” he giggles happily, fixing himself in the saddle. “Yes, this is exactly what dreams coming true taste like.”