Extreme sports

The first extreme sport I decided to research is:
Parkour 

Wikipedia defines it as "a method of movement focused on moving around obstacles with speed and efficiency. " - and that's what it is basically about. People jump and climb around in their (most urban) environment, while they use every possible object as an obstacle they have to overcome. Like this they run  on (!) walls, jump over the handrail of escalators and climb up buildings. This also often results in accidents like you can see in this video:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYTcodJ2YQ8


Your body needs to be in a very good condition - because even if it's looks very easy it takes a lot of strength and concentration, this is also the reason why people fail so often trying it.
I still remember we once did it in school - not outside but inside the gym, where we arranged an artificial parkour with different pieces of sport equipment and then tried to jump and run over things as fast and accident-free as possible. I just remember that most of us (including me) failed terribly...it is really hard !
But I have a great respect for people who succeed in doing this, like in this video:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPIw3cv8Zls


they even made a hole story out of it! Really impressive. This shows that incredible stunts don't only exist in Hollywood!




The second extreme sport I chose is :
Extreme tourism


Even if this doesn't sound like an extreme sport on the first sight, you find it on the internet when you search for extreme sports. This expression stands for the kind of tourist that doesn't invest in things like hotels and tourist attraction, but that goes to especially dangerous and adventurous places. As they go to this places they of course don't lie in bed or at the beach all like normal tourists do, and this makes it (in my opinion) also a sport:
They travel to places like mountains, jungles, deserts and caves to make extreme experiences - they climb up high in the mountains, sometimes without safeguard, they slap through the jungle next to wild animals which could easily attack them during the night when they camp in self-built tents. They also camp in the desert, always fearing they could run out of water if they don't find the next city, exposing their bodies to extreme situations.