TWO DAYS BEFORE THE START of the attempt, Miles was standing on his front lawn, bent over an ailing mower that, like every other mechanically driven item associated with him—cars, boats, power tools—seemed to have had its last legs amputated years ago. The Daisher homestead suggests suburban domesticity slightly tweaked, the white vinyl siding concealing a garage full of parachutes, kayaks, and bowling balls.

"Can't have the lawn half mowed when everyone starts showing up for this thing," Miles said. "Plus mowing the lawn's kind of a Zen thing for me. It's like therapy, makes you forget about all the other stuff."

The pre-event frenzy was a constant reminder that, though adventurous lives like Miles's are easy to romanticize, prosaic details are not easily escaped. There were diapers to be changed, bills to be paid, and dogs to be fed. The house phone and two cell phones rang constantly. Nikki handled most of the calls.

"It's not going to be butterflies in your stomach when you step over that rail for the first time, dude," Miles tells me, describing what my first jump might feel like. "Those'll be bats." And then it's happening.

She's quieter and more pragmatic than her husband and has learned to take the danger element of what he does in stride. He is a safety fanatic, she pointed out, "and he's good about keeping his head about him. I trust him to make the right decisions."

But Miles was clearly feeling the weight of the upcoming record bid. "I'm almost starting to get nervous," he told me as we cruised to Costco in Blue Thunder, his 1990 Subaru wagon with 300,000-plus miles on it. "Not about the jumping but all the logistics of this record-attempt thing." His publicity efforts, at least, were starting to pay dividends. Regular plugs on local radio ("This Friday, for one day only . . .") and extensive coverage in the Twin Falls Times-News meant that he'd arrived as a local celebrity.

Jack toughens up and prepares to climb Mt. El Capitan by taking on the dangerous sport of mountaineering. Click here for video

---

Frequent contributor TIM SOHN recently completed his master's in history at Cambridge University.

•	Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift!
•	Give the gift of Outside Magazine!
•	Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more.