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What Are Adventure Sports:
 Adventure sports have seen a major rise in participation in recent years. Adventure sports tend to offer a different kind of experience from the one offered by traditional sports. The sports tend to be solitary, often set in a natural environment and in fact environmental factors and obstacles such as wind, terrain, water and mountains usually offer the challenge to the participant, rather than taking the place of the opponent however the participant often must learn to master or sometimes harness these elements. Of course when dealing with such uncontrolled variables there is always an element of risk attached to these activities and for some therein lies the appeal; the ability to control oneself in an environment which is totally out of control.
 Invariably these type of sports are extremely difficult to judge in the conventional sense, whenever people are pitted against each other in these type of activities, like in events such as the X Games, there is usually an aesthetic element to the scoring system. Unlike in a game like rugby for example, where if you touch the ball down over the line it counts as a try and earns you a specifically defined amount of points, in these sports you not only have to succeed you have to look good doing it.
As participation in adventure and extreme sports has risen over recent years some efforts have been made to determine what it is that is drawing people to these activities. It seems that the drive to participate in such activities may come from an instinctual urge to fill a void of experience lacking in our western culture. Parallels have been drawn by sociologists between risk taking in certain adventure or extreme sports and traditional rites of passage experienced in other cultures which usually involve elements of risk and skill.
 It has also been said that people are becoming more and more drawn to these type of activities as a backlash to the perceived increase in safety imposed on us by modern life, leading people to seek out dander or thrill.
Certainly the medical community agree that where people are involved in experiences which generate adrenaline the happiness and euphoria inducing endorphins such as dopamine and serotonin are usually not far behind, particularly where the experience is perceived as being a positive one.
It is perhaps not surprising then that when top athletes, in for example, the discipline of snow boarding or surfing, describe what a good run feels like, their answers sometimes describe an experience that conjures images of something akin to meditation. They often use words like weightlessness, invincibility, flow and zen. Inevitably a profound sense of freedom is also mentioned, perhaps due to the dynamic and innovative nature of these activities and the sense of being unconstrained by any set parameters.
 There has even been the identification of the “type T personality”, defined as being creative, usually extroverted thrill seekers who crave novel experiences.
When it comes to sport the amount of risk that we describe as a ‘normal amount’ is usually defined by what we see as acceptable based on cultural expectations and the skill and experience of the person involved. For most of us the risks involved in certain adventure sports or extreme activities would be enough to dissuade us from ever participating in them but those who do participate would no doubt argue that the greater risk is in living a life where we are not experiencing all that’s on offer.
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