Honza Rejmanek competed in the Red Bull X-Alps 5 times. His last was in 2015 but apparently nutty runs in the family and he and his son Martin have been doing incredible 8 day tandem vol-biv adventures for the past three years in the Alps. Their style is pure- no mechanical support is allowed (ie they fly or they walk), food is collected or carried, where they start and end is fixed so if they don’t make it one year they just come back the next! Honza says compared to the X-Alps they move at about one quarter of the speed but with four times the weight and no support crew!

This is an emergency episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem that everyone needs to hear. I sat down with two people on the front lines of Covid-19, my sister Lesley McClurg who is a Health and Science reporter for KQED in San Francisco, who has covered the pandemic since early January, when only 6 people had died; and Terry O’Connor, an ER doctor in Ketchum, Idaho- one of the most affected towns in the country (on par per capita with New York, San Francisco, and Seattle). We are in the largest public health crisis of our times. Covid-19 is being compared to the Spanish Influenza in 1918, which killed 50 million people. No one alive has ever seen anything like this before.

In this episode we learn about how Manu approaches building autonomy with his students; the importance of the mental side of the sport; finding the equilibrium between motivation and safety; chasing the aesthetic over personal bests and kilometer counting; how to get pilots in a positive state of mind; teaching people to avoid making stupid mistakes; the extreme risk of social media and external motivation and flying; how to free the unconscious mind; the three things that lead to accidents; switching to “autopilot”; where “happiness” lies in flying and a TON, TON more.