#Omer mei dan how to

The Mei-Dans are also involved in the local Jewish community. A paratrooper, Mei-Dan also found he really liked jumping. His father was a pediatrician and Mei-Dan was always interested in medicine, but his drive to become a physician was strengthened in the Israel Defense Forces, where he says he couldn’t abide standing on the sidelines while comrades were injured.

Raised on Kibbutz Ein Hamifratz north of Haifa, Mei-Dan’s outdoorsy pursuits began on a surfboard in the Mediterranean at age 10 and quickly escalated. He does backcountry skiing and ice climbing in the winter, whitewater kayaking in summer, and rock climbing and mountaineering all year long. Mei-Dan’s own extreme athletic activities are not limited to BASE jumping.

#Omer mei dan how to

Mei-Dan, who was born in Israel and moved to this city in 2012, stands out among BASE jumpers because he has found a way to combine his passion for extreme sports with his other area of expertise: medicine.Ī highly sought-after orthopedic surgeon with a robust medical practice at the University of Colorado in Denver and Boulder, Mei-Dan studies extreme sports athletes, operates on them and helps other physicians understand how to guide their rehabilitation. Extreme sports athletes have the ability to sustain, cope with and enjoy the amount of stress other people would define as bad experiences.” “In BASE jumping, every small thing dictates life or death. “I like being afraid, I like the fear, I enjoy it,” Mei-Dan told JTA in an interview in Boulder, where he lives with his wife and three children. Omer Mei-Dan jumps into the Cave of Swallows, a 1,200-footdeep site in Mexico. Even a tiny mistake or misfortune – a gust of wind, impeded visibility, an equipment mishap – can mean sudden and violent death. Perhaps not surprisingly, BASE jumpers are killed with alarming regularity. To guide and control their falls, jumpers often don wingsuits, which make them look like bats or flying squirrels. And for leaps that involve hazards below, like craggy mountainsides or steel structures, the risks are exponentially greater. Skydiving is a cakewalk by comparison.īecause BASE jumpers leap from much lower altitudes, they often have mere milliseconds to deploy their parachutes. Just don’t call him a skydiver.Īn orthopedic surgeon and extreme sports athlete, Mei-Dan, 42, is a BASE jumper – one of an estimated 1,500 to 3,000 worldwide who jump from the fixed platforms for which the sport is named: buildings, antennas, spans and earth. BOULDER, Colorado – Omer Mei-Dan has jumped off more cliffs than he can count – not to mention helicopters, skyscrapers and bridges.