Flying Trapeze
Alex and I did a flying trapeze class at the Circus School in SF recently. I would recommend it. It has a surprisingly fast ramp from never having done it to having fun.
The first ten or fifteen minutes are ‘ground school’ where you learn the core instructions and practice a knee hang on a static trapeze, which turned out to be harder than doing one midair.
The very first time you go up to fly, you do the knee hang, and after a few runs through, you do a midair catch where you leave the trapeze and hold on to another person (in this case, an instructor). The main trick is that you do the actions at the point in your trapeze arc where you’re effectively weightless, so you don’t rely on physical strength to maneuver–it’s more about doing things at the right time. It also helps that the belayer seems to have a lot of control over your velocity so they can set you up. (At one point Alex was struggling to get a knee hang and I’m pretty sure the belayer accelerated her swing so that she’d be able to do another attempt–and she got it!)
The hardest part was hearing the instructor and doing moves at the right time because all of my attention was focused on the physical state of hanging from the trapeze. As I was flying, I never once thought about my fear of heights or even noticed the ground. My primary memories are visual snapshots of the trapeze bar and how my body was interacting with it (getting my legs over it, or removing them from it when doing a knee hang).
After finishing a trick and coming down to the net, the best description I have is that I had memories of a feeling of exhilaration.
The whole thing also felt quite safe–both in principle and in practice. You’re wearing a harness attached to the belayer, and on the dismount, the belayer controls the speed of descent so that you don’t even hit the net very fast. And while you’re up in the air, there’s no time to think about how high up you are (30 feet I guess?). I was probably most scared climbing the ladder to the platform (you can attach a safety line for that too).
Getting off the net is a bit of a trick: it’s about eight or nine feet off the ground, so you can’t just jump. Instead, you shimmy to the edge, stick your torso out beyond the net, grab two rope handholds and do a forward roll down onto a mat. It looks hard when you see someone else do it but was surprisingly easy in practice. (Again, I think partially because the person who was previously belaying you helps you out and keeps you from accelerating too fast.)
If you make a mistake while flying–like not hearing the instructor in time–all you do is hold steady and wait for the next instruction. In one case, I missed the chance to do a midair catch (on my second try–the first time worked), so we ended up aborting and just doing a normal landing instead.
As I said, it doesn’t require a great deal of strength, though it is still physically challenging. I started to cramp a bit after a few flights, and I ended up sore for multiple days after, in my hamstrings, core, and also my neck. You’re certainly holding your body in positions it’s not used to against some unusual g forces.
If anything, I think you’re best off having flexibility because getting your legs around the trapeze for the knee hang is a little tricky. One of the other new flyers was extremely lithe, but unable to do a pullup, and she was extremely smooth midair. I imagine that this might be less true of more advanced moves–the instructors seemed extremely fit and I imagine that (for example) consistently catching someone requires a lot of grip strength.
Logistically, the class was well run. They limit it to eight students (and have at least three instructors–one belayer, one person helping you at the top of the platform, and one person giving instructions and feedback mid-flight). As a result, we were able to do something like five or six flights (I don’t remember the exact number) in about 90 minutes. This might feel like a lot of standing around, but it’s helpful as recovery time, and you get to watch your classmates and see how their flights go. Because the class is an ‘all levels’ class you get to watch people do some pretty neat tricks and also see what it’s like for someone getting less assistance.
Overall, I was very impressed with how accessible the class was. Flying trapeze has an impressive ability to scale a difficult activity down and make it possible for beginners to have fun almost immediately.