My drowning and other inconveniences (2017)

The secret to river rafting at 73? Always keep moving. My father is 86 and still goes to the gym daily to lift weights and walk the treadmill. It's a bit of a social club too - but he primarily goes to keep moving. Effective advice!

Yeah, I mean there might be some survivorship bias here but my Grandmother always said something similar. "When you stop walking every day, you'll stop being able to walk!" - she's 90 now, and still does a circuit in her neighborhood at least every couple of days.

I do think there's something to it though - in Western society in general we don't do enough exercise, and the culture of retirement is to slow down and relax even more. Since it's so hard to regain muscle mass as you get older, I can see how it might be a "use it or lose it" kind of situation.

Whitewater kayaking is the only extreme sport I've seriously tried so far that I outright quit. I learned how to sweep roll (when you are upside-down in a kayak and flip upright), I learned how to hand-roll, ran several class III rapids, surfed kayaks in the Atlantic hurricane swell, and I was working on a special recovery roll that I can't remember the name of when I decided to quit and never do it again. I've rappelled down into huge caves on single ropes, towed my hang glider thousands of feet into terrifyingly active Texas air, and swam in icy underground water, but whitewater kayaking is the only one that inspires real fear.

I think it's something about the pace at which you die. When you fall down a hole in a cave, you go splat at the bottom and die in seconds, and when you fall from the sky in a hang glider (which I've done), you have about thirty seconds to think about what's happening and then you actually have a reasonably good change of not dying when your glider hits the ground. When you get hypothermia, which I've caught a mild case of, it can take between thirty minutes to five hours to really die. But when you get smacked by a loud, cold, angry river, eject from your kayak, and end up trapped in tree branches and held under to drown like an animal, the river assaults you in a way that I do not have the eloquence to describe. The current is terrifying, the water hurts, the strength is drained out of your limbs in seconds, and often you're only a foot or two from breathing perfectly well. It doesn't feel like you should be dying--your body isn't broken, you haven't had a prolonged struggle with nature, you just go from alive and happy to dead and nothing in about a minute.

WW kayakers also die for no reason at all. Hang glider pilots fly on days they should have known not to launch, or they try things they're not ready for. Cavers forget to inspect their equipment or get rained in. But whitewater kayakers from beginner to expert go out on a sunny day with great conditions, make a miniscule mistake they never could have trained for, and are mercilessly executed by the river. You can see it and hear it in the videos of WW kayakers "swimming" rapids, when they've had to jump out of their boat--they're terrified, because they know that if they fall into a hole or get sucked under the pourover there is very little anyone can do for them.

It goes without saying that it's by far the most fun of all the others, but it's just not worth it.

I definitely had a decade of my life where whitewater kayaking was my drug of choice, and I agree 100%. I think one of the things that we have so little intuition for is how massive water is. I don't even know if that is the right word, or if we have a word.

As a point of reference the standard for an Olympic artificial whitewater canoe/kayak course is something like 12 cubic meters per second (you might hear kayakers saying cumets).

A cubic meter of water literally weighs a ton (1000kg).

12 m³/s is approximately equivalent to a continuous stream of nose to tail Chevy Suburbans (3t each) at about 50 mph.

Real rivers typically have far higher flow rates --- 100 m³/s 3,500 ft³/s is not unknown