GROW A PAIR – LIKE BEAR (Mens Health – 10/18/2011)
TWO HUNDRED FEET UP, with the waters of the English Channel lapping below, Bear Grylls wants to know how I am with heights. We’re strapped into harnesses and standing on a chalk cliff at the Isle of Wight’s westernmost tip. In 5 minutes we’ll rappel down the cliff—part of a formation, called the Needles, that juts out like shark teeth—and now he asks? I allow that heights may possibly rattle my nerves. “Fear is normal,” he says, surely not for the first time. “It’s a tool that sharpens us for what we need to do.”
The idea is that I’ll descend first, with Grylls following. It’s only fitting that a journalist with zero climbing experience would show the Man vs. Wild star (who has twice summited Everest—once on foot and once in a paraglider) how it’s done. We’ll venture in succession onto a ridge that’s perhaps 6 inches across, and from there lower ourselves with ropes to a small ledge halfway down the cliff. There we’ll pause to conduct an interview, and through this process the Men’s Health reader will learn how he can live more adventurously. Grylls advises me to shuffle onto the ridge, hook my rope into a crack in the cliff, and then rappel. “Just don’t look down,” he says. And then it’s go time.