Special Guest Blogger: Felix Baumgartner

So, here I am. Or rather, here I’m not anymore. And let me tell you, the irony of my current predicament isn’t lost on me. It hangs heavier than my reputation for jumping out of perfectly good, or in my case, perfectly high, vehicles.
Most of you probably know me for the jump, right? The one where I basically fell from God's attic? Yeah, that one. October 14, 2012. Stratosphere. Edge of Space. 128,000 feet. Breaking the sound barrier with nothing but a fancy suit and a very deep breath. That was my masterpiece, my magnum opus, my hold my beer and watch this moment taken to stratospheric levels.
Honestly, the view up there was indescribable. The curvature of the Earth, the inky blackness above, the sheer, mind-numbing vacuum of it all. For a moment, even my iron-clad Austrian nerves felt a little wobbly. I mean, here I was, a guy who spent his life defying gravity, about to voluntarily throw myself into it from a height that made commercial airliners look like ants on the pavement.
The freefall itself? A blur. Literally. I was going so fast, my own thoughts couldn’t keep up. It was pure sensation, pure adrenaline, pure oh dear God, please let my parachute open. There was a moment, when I first stepped off that capsule, where I looked down and thought, Felix, you absolute madman. What have you gotten yourself into now? It was glorious. It was terrifying. It was, without a doubt, the most alive I’d ever felt. And landing? Pure relief. The cheers, the record books, the endorsement deals… it was all gravy. The world knew Felix Baumgartner. The man who fell from space.
And then… there’s the other thing. The frankly tad embarrassing footnote to an otherwise stellar career.
Remember how I said I cheated death from the edge of space? Well, apparently, death decided to catch up with me closer to sea level.
The man who laughed in the face of terminal velocity, shuffled off this mortal coil not  going out in a wing suit incident over an active volcano but in a motorised paragliding accident in Italy.
I leap from the literal edge of human existence, survive a journey through the upper atmosphere at speeds faster than sound, perfect countless BASE jumps from impossibly high landmarks, and what finally gets me? A glorified lawnmower with a bed sheet.
I mean, I’ve got to laugh, haven’t I? What else is there to do? I spent my entire life pushing boundaries, tempting fate, staring down the abyss. I’ve freefallen from cliffs, skyscrapers and even the very edge of the stratosphere. I survived every single one of those calculated risks, honed through years of training and experience. And then, one ordinary afternoon, enjoying a relatively tame hobby, poof. Gone.