Shane McConkey and the End of Extreme

"You step off the edge, and everything goes away," Shane McConkey told one of the last interviewers he ever met. "And you’re just 100 percent in the zone – you’re flying now. You’re a bird."

Human flight is one of the oldest human dreams, and also one of the deadliest. Skiing off cliffs with a parachute, and later a wingsuit, Shane McConkey came as close as you can to achieving that dream. But not close enough. My piece about his extraordinary life and death, in the July/August Men's Journal, is one of the saddest I've ever had to write. The devastated wife, their three-year-old daughter, the stunned friends who now have a Shane-size hole in their lives, all because he just couldn't quit while he was ahead. For whatever reason.

I tried to capture his personality and his vision in the piece, but this shot-perfect James Bond homage (from the Matchstick Productions film Seven Sunny Days) is how I choose to remember him: