But what fascinated me most was how Aikins was going to find and land on that net. The job seemed harder than finding a needle in a haystack. (At least you get to be on the ground for that chore, and the only thing you might die from is boredom.) The team purchased eight precision approach path indicators—fancy lightbulbs usually used to guide airplanes into position to land on runways. For this jump, the lights would guide Aikins to the center of the net they hoped would catch him. Each lightbulb emitted red and white high-intensity beams alongside one another, a combination that created a single beam that should be easy to detect even from a few miles up. The team placed indicator lights outside the net, forming two concentric circles like the double and triple rings surrounding the bull’s-eye on a dartboard. Aikins’s goal was to position himself over the center of the net. When he moved off the net, the light would look red. When he moved back over the center of the net, the light would appear white again. Aikins knew that as he was falling—or as they say, flying—he needed to stay inside that white light. The challenge (as if there weren’t enough already) was that in practice runs even when it might feel like they were falling straight down, GPS tracking systems had shown they could be moving by as much as twenty miles per hour horizontally. I told Provenzano that if I was jumping to what would inevitably be my death, I didn’t think I’d be keeping track of colors and what they mean. Provenzano said it wasn’t hard. “White, you’re all right, but red and you’re dead.”
As dodgy a career path as this seemed to me, Provenzano and the team did not intend to toss Aikins out of a plane without a trial run, or two, or two hundred. They chucked a weighted dummy out a few times and jumped with backup parachutes to practice. Each test run was meant to push the equipment and the team to find their limits.
On their first trial run, they realized that the lighting system they’d designed wasn’t doing the job. The lights were misplaced. One set of lights marked the edges of the 100-foot-wide net. The second ring circumscribed it, 250 feet out from the center. Even though these rings were close enough that you could block them out of view with your thumb on an outstretched arm for most of the trip down from the plane, Provenzano told me that on that test jump, he and Aikins didn’t see the second ring. All of the beams of lights were pointed straight up. They were strong enough to cut through the atmosphere, and the pilot could see them before they jumped. But once Provenzano and Aikins stepped off, they were so focused on the four lights surrounding the bull’s-eye that the other lights making up the outer ring had essentially disappeared. The skydivers did not see anything outside their narrow field of view, upon which they were intensely focused.
So the team made an adjustment. They shrank the diameter of both the inner and outer rings to 30 percent and 40 percent, respectively, of their original sizes. The window of white light was much smaller now. But unlike before, it illuminated the only space on which Aikins needed to, and in fact did, focus his attention.
So how did it all end up? On July 30, 2016, 25,000 feet above the ground, Aikins moved to the Cessna’s door, clutching his bailout oxygen bottle. He stuck his head outside and looked down. He couldn’t see the net, but he stepped out anyway. He flew through the sky. Monitors registered Aikins’s heart rate at 148 beats per minute. He was more relaxed and composed than I am when mimicking hip-hop moves in Zumba class. He was gliding through the air, searching for the white lights. Once he locked on to them, he stayed in the white for the rest of the trip down. When he was three hundred feet from the net, Aikins barrel-rolled onto his back so that the net could cradle his body as it bent him at the waist. Two minutes and nine seconds after he’d left the plane, he hit the net. Aikins screamed on impact—not from pain, but from the overwhelming sense of relief and pride in having accomplished something that had seemed impossible.
Though the Arizona desert is vast and wide, Aikins’s visual focus was narrow and sharp, much like Joseph Petzval’s camera lens. The view he could have had from so far above the earth might have been wide and vast, with layers of mountains off to the side and the streams and roads snaking around the landscape. But as he fell from the heavens, he didn’t see any of that. Once he locked on to the position of the net, all else that surrounded it was a blur. And that was key for this job.
Narrow Focus Among the Athletic Elites
Joan Benoit Samuelson kept her shoes no more than two feet off the ground, a far cry from the 25,000 that marked Luke Aikins’s story, but in so doing she accomplished what literally no other woman had done. She was the first-ever women’s Olympic marathon champion, trouncing the competition in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, the year the women’s marathon was introduced to the games. Samuelson had taken up long-distance running in high school to help her recover from a broken leg she’d suffered in a skiing accident. As a college student, she entered the 1979 Boston Marathon as a relative unknown. She won the race, knocking eight minutes off the competition record—a time she beat four years later, when she improved by more than twelve minutes and set a new world record.
How did she do it?
Though Samuelson never met Petzval or Aikins, her technique for conquering the challenges in her field echoes the engineered designs of the camera lens and bull’s-eye lighting system. She looks at the world around her with a narrow focus.
When she runs, Samuelson scans the runners ahead of her. She picks one—a runner in pink shorts, say—and passes her. She then identifies a new mark, and passes that one too. She takes a goal that seems far off—26.22 miles, to be exact; a goal that sure sounds impossible for most of us to hit—and breaks it down, essentially unpacking it, into manageable parts. Samuelson establishes goals that are challenging but possible to achieve, inspiring without being crushing; goals that push her to move faster without exhausting her. Samuelson does this for the last quarter of a marathon, until she reaches the finish line. She trains her eyes to focus on each new subgoal, which motivates her to move faster despite the fatigue that nearly everyone experiences at some point. And in doing that, the larger goal, which once appeared remote, becomes tangible and in view.
Samuelson’s accomplishments set her apart from the pack, quite literally, but her technique is actually shared by other accomplished runners, as I discovered one cold night in January while sitting on the floor of a Brooklyn YMCA.
Once a week, an elite team of runners called Zenith Velocity trains on an orange rubber track a quarter of the normal size at this YMCA. Members are well decorated. One is the fastest man out of Nigeria. Another is the third-quickest Trinidadian, who trained alongside Usain “Lightning” Bolt, the fastest human in history. And a third, Lalonde Gordon, is a double Olympic bronze medalist and the first Tobagonian to medal at any Olympic Games.
Before they found their way to their blocks that night, these elite runners each spent some time talking to me about how they look at the path ahead.