Grayslake sky diver leaping at chance for world title

Nearly 16 years to the day after he jumped out of an airplane for the first time, Grayslake resident and renowned sky diver Brian Martin performed a nearly perfect aerial routine in the skies over Raeford, North Carolina, earlier this month to win the U.S. Parachute Association National Parachuting Championships.

And now that he's earned a gold medal in the national competition, Martin, his diving partner, John Bechtel, and their videographer, Bob Felt, are preparing to represent the United States at the 2018 World Parachuting Championships in Australia.

Martin, who estimates he's jumped out of an airplane more than 5,000 times, competes in an event called two-way canopy formation sky diving. To excel in the event, he and Bechtel must perform highly technical and perfectly coordinated movements for about a minute while they plummet 7,500 feet to the ground.

They've been training a together for the last eight years and competing in the national championships since 2010. This is the second time they've taken home the gold and earned a chance to compete against the world's best.

Martin, 34, said one of the reasons they've enjoyed such success is that they've stayed together longer than most teams.

"A lot of teams take it too seriously and get burned out," Martin said. "We found the right balance of training hard and doing it for fun. If it's not going well, we'll call it a day."

For Martin, sky diving has been fun since his first jump Sept. 2, 2001, just after starting his freshman year at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

"It was with the student-run sky diving club, thought it sounded interesting and like most people I thought I'd just do it the one time and be done with it," Martin said. "But I did three times that first day."

Hooked, it took him just nine months to do the 25 jumps necessary to get his sky diving license. In 2005 he became an instructor at Skydive Milwaukee in East Troy, Wisconsin.

Martin, whose works as a software engineering when he's on the ground, figures he has led more than 1,500 sky diving lessons.

Most of the time those lessons culminate in a tandem jump, which means he is strapped to a new jumper and handles the responsibility of pulling the ripcord. In all the years he's been teaching, only a small number of students have been too nervous to go through with the jump.

"For some reason it is always men," Martin said. "Well, I think maybe the reason is women are smart enough to not get talked into it in the first place if they don't want to go. Guys will let themselves get talked into it."

Martin said his team put on its best performance last week and hopes to do even better at the world championships, which begin Oct. 5, 2018, in Queensland, Australia.