Written By: Michael D. McClellan |
Psst. Nik Wallenda has a secret he wants to share. The record-setting daredevil, who has thrilled millions with his white-knuckle treks across the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, and – wait for it – an active volcano, found himself at a crossroads after an eight-person pyramid collapse injured five, including his sister, who ended up in a coma and had 73 screws and plates inserted into her face. Wallenda, who was anchoring that pyramid under the Circus Sarasota Big Top that winter afternoon in 2017, clung to the wire for dear life when the team’s practice stunt when horribly wrong. While he walked away without a scratch and stepped back onto the wire the next day, Wallenda wasn’t as unfazed by the accident as it seemed on the surface.
“I was battling fear,” says Wallenda, who dives deep into the traumatic event in his new book, ‘Facing Fear: Step Out in Faith and Rise Above What’s Holding You Back’ (Sept. 15/HarperCollins). “We were attempting to break a world record for the highest four-level, eight-person pyramid. After training for six weeks we brought it up to 30 feet above the ground. We were days before attempting it in front of a live audience and in front of Guinness, and then the collapse happened. I got back on the wire the next day, and performed for the next six weeks as if nothing were wrong. But then, when that contract ended, I had six weeks where I wasn’t performing. That’s when I realized that there was something different about me. I started experiencing fear. It was an entirely new emotion to me, and it became debilitating, to the point where I told my wife I was done.”
For Wallenda – a seventh-generation member of The Flying Wallendas family of aerialists – this was not only a stunning admission, but the first step in his journey to overcome fear and resume the death-defying feats that have captivated imaginations around the globe. And if you’re wondering whether Wallenda is fully healed, you need look no further than his March 4, 2020, walk across the heat-generating, gas-spewing Masaya Volcano in Nicaragua. Crossing the volcano’s active lava lake, Wallenda offered proof positive that he’s on top of his game.
“That walk was challenging in so many different ways,” he says. “Pulling it off wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t gone through the process of facing my fear and silencing the shame that came along with it. From that point I was able to work through my fear and resurrect my dreams of being a world-class aerialist.”
A holder of 11 Guinness World Records, Wallenda has more than lived up to the legacy created by his great-grandfather Karl, who brought the family to the United States in the 1920s and immediately started thrilling young and old alike.
“I’m very proud of our family’s place in history,” Wallenda says, “and I’m proud to do my part to carry on the tradition, even though my mom and dad tried to push me away from the industry. They didn’t want me to carry it on because of the struggles of the circus world. My great-grandfather said it best in the 1970s: ‘In this business, one day you eat the chicken. The next day you eat the feathers.’ I totally get that now. This is a very fickle, very feast-or-famine business.”
Crossing Niagara Falls into Canada on June 12, 2012, Wallenda made history of his own: Enigma Research estimates that one billion people had either seen or knew of Wallenda’s Niagara Falls walk. The event was ABC’s highest rated Friday night program since November 2007, and the highest non-sports summertime program on any of the major networks in six years. A year later, Wallenda upped the ante with a riveting walk across the Grand Canyon, completing the 1,400 foot walk in 22 minutes, 54 seconds, using a 2-inch-thick steel cable.
Tiffany Brown/Associated Press Images for Discovery Communications
Wallenda has built quite the resumé by defying convention. He’s crossed the Chicago and New York City skylines on a high-wire; he’s hung from his teeth 250 feet above the ground as part of a helicopter stunt in Branson, Missouri; and he’s crossed between the two towers of the ten-story Condado Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, recreating the very act that had killed his great-grandfather Karl Wallenda in 1978. None of it possible without a healthy approach to managing his fear.
“I’m human, just like everyone else,” he says. “Fear is something we all have to overcome. I hope this book helps others take what I’ve learned and apply it to their everyday lives.”
The Wallenda name is synonymous with thrill seeking. We’re talking hundreds of years!
My family started performing in the 1780s in Bohemia, eventually making their way to Europe and into Germany, and then on into the United States in the 1920s. We’ve been at it for quite a long time, that’s for sure!
How did your family end up in the U.S.?
In 1927 they performed in Havana, Cuba. John Ringling, who was based in Florida, heard of this amazing high-wire troupe that he had to go see with his own eyes. So, he got on a ship and went over to Cuba to watch the show that my family was headlining. When the show’s owner caught wind that John Ringling was in the crowd, he went to my great-grandfather and said, “You guys have the night off tonight.” This didn’t make sense, especially since it was a packed house and everybody was there to see them. Long story short, the show’s owner knew that John Ringling would like what he saw, and that he would immediately poach my family and bring them to the United States. Well, John Ringling was a smart man, and he knew that there was a reason my family was pulled from the show. I’m sure it had happened to him many times before during his lifetime. So he sneaked back in the following day, saw my family perform, and immediately signed them as part of the “The Greatest Show on Earth” with Ringling Brothers. The next year, in 1928, they made their way to the United States, and my family headlined at Ringling Brothers for about 17 years.
Was that when the press starting calling your family The Flying Wallendas?
It was around the time that my great-grandfather went out on his own, opening his own show in the 1940s. In 1947 he created the famous seven-person pyramid, and performed that until about 1962. That’s when they had that tragic accident in Detroit, Michigan. A couple of my family members were killed, and an uncle was paralyzed from the waist down. My great-grandfather sneaked out of the hospital the next day against the doctor’s orders, just to get back on the wire. It was an example of him living by the family legacy, and the now famous words, “The show must go on.” That’s something I still believe in, although I use the words “Never give up.” In fact, that’s how I sign every autograph.
Your great-grandfather was the legendary Karl Wallenda. He was about as fearless as they come.
Yes, he was fearless in many ways. He went on to create these amazing pyramids performed all over the world, and he walked the wire into his 70s. He walked across Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia with 30,000 people looking on, open-mouthed, and he walked it in places like Tallulah Gorge, Georgia, on a wire 1,000 feet across and 750 feet above the ground. He was 65 at the time, and his wife handed him a martini when he reached the other side – but not before he’d stopping midway to do a couple of handstands, one in honor of our soldiers in Vietnam, and another for laughs, so he was definitely a showman with a flair for the dramatic.
My great-grandfather eventually made his way to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where my family was headlining on a show that wasn’t selling many tickets. He decided to do a walk between two skyscrapers at the Condado Plaza Hotel to help promote show. He was 73 years old at the time. He got on that wire unaware that it had been rigged unstable; the guys who rigged it weren’t part of his normal team that included my uncle, who was performing elsewhere, and my father, who was home because my mother had just suffered a miscarriage. Long story short, because of the high winds and the improperly secured wire, he lost his balance, fell, and lost his life. That was in 1978, Less than a year later I was born, and that was the legacy that I inherited.
Karl Wallenda’s best friend was none other than Evel Knievel.
Yes, they were very close friends. They both shared the same passion for entertainment, and also for pushing the limits. It’s just like me being friends with David Blaine, Chris Angel, and many of the other daredevils today. I think because there’s not a lot of us, and because we are all part of the same small community, that a natural closeness develops. It was the same with my great-grandfather. He and Evel Knievel spent a lot of time together during their lifetimes. They respected each other a great deal. In fact, when Evel Knievel attempted his big jump in that rocket over the Snake River Canyon, he recruited my family to open for him. If you look at the ticket stubs you’ll see the Wallenda name right there. So they were close. They performed a lot and spent quite a bit of time together.
When did you start walking the wire?
My mom was six months pregnant with me and still walking on the wire, so I’ve been walking on a wire longer than my feet have been on terra firma [laughs]. As soon as I could stand up, they had me on a wire a couple of feet off the ground. Not on my own, obviously; my mom or my dad would grab my hand and sort of walk me back and forth. I have photos of me walking on a wire at 18 months old. My great-grandfather really said it best in the book that he wrote in the 1970s. He said, “Life is on the wire, and everything else is just waiting.” That is very true. For my family it is a very literal expression, but the reality of the situation is that everybody is on a wire. That’s one of the reasons that I wrote this book, because everybody is on a wire and everybody’s trying to get to the other side. My family just does it in a literal sense: Even though there are gases in the volcano, or heavy winds in the Grand Canyon, or heavy mists at Niagara Falls, we are still going to face our fears and make it across to the other side.
In 2013 you performed that heart-stopping wire walk over the Grand Canyon with millions watching on TV.
Very early on, it was a dream of mine to walk across the Grand Canyon. In fact, I was making plans to walk across the Grand Canyon well before I sought permission to cross Niagara Falls. It was a long and tedious process of just figuring out where in the canyon I could walk. And then there was the engineering involved, which was just as much of a challenge as actually getting on that wire and walking it.
How did you train for that walk?
I trained with wind machines creating gusts of up to 90 mph. We knew that the winds were not going to exceed 50 mph, so training at 90 mph really helped me prepare both physically and mentally. I did have to endure a couple of 43-mph gusts while I was out there the day of the walk, so it did get fairly windy. What I learned from walking the Grand Canyon is that you can never train enough. I remember being out in the middle of the canyon and thinking that, even though I’d trained in 90-mph winds, I wish I had trained at 120-mph winds. When you’re in the real setting, you’re much better of mentally, emotionally, and physically if your preparation has gone above and beyond. Thankfully everything worked out. The result was a dream come true. It was an extremely successful TV special. In fact, my Grand Canyon walk still remains the highest-rated special in the history of the Discovery Channel, which is the largest network in the world. It was a huge success, and it opened a lot of doors.
Jessica Koscielniak / Sun-Times, File
How do you cross the Grand Canyon on a wire, with no harness, and keep calm?
A lot of it is the power of our mind – where we allow our mind to go, and what energy we give our thoughts. I am a believer, so I give all of my thoughts to God. There are so many times in life where my mind will want to go to a negative spot. The Grand Canyon is a perfect example. When I got hit with those 43-mph winds, my mind naturally wanted to freak out. I was then able to counter that negative thought with the fact that I had trained and prepared for that moment. Everything was going to be okay. I’d practiced walking in 90-mph wind gusts. I’m going to be okay. So I sort of talked myself down, and before you know it, my heartrate dropped down to a normal level.
Your new book is titled Facing Fear.
In some ways, I guess I never realized what fear was because I was raised to be fearless. The reason I wrote the book was because of that 2017 eight-person pyramid fall while training in Sarasota, and the fear that I experienced after that. The book talks in depth about the process that I went through to overcome fear after that terrible accident.
How do you deal with fear after something like that pyramid collapse?
After that accident, I started to experience fear to the point where it became debilitating. I actually thought I was done walking the wire. I remember that crucial conversation with my wife, where she said, “Look, I support you, but the family lives by the words ‘the show must go on.’ You do what you do to inspire people. I think you may need to dig a little deeper.” Well, that really set me off on a faith journey, one that was about finding out who I was, and then realizing that, yes, fear was a part of it, and that the seed had been planted during that accident. Reality of what happened that day hit me – I’d almost lost my sister. She was torn up and in a coma, and had 73 screws and plates in her face alone. And even though I got back on that wire the next day, I came to the realization that I was avoiding a very essential fact: Despite what I might have looked like on the outside, I was running from fear rather than dealing with it.
Is it fair to say that you were in denial of that fear?
That’s very true. My pastor recommended seeing this amazing Christian psychologist in town. After spending an hour with her I remember saying, “I’m fine. I got back on the wire right away. I don’t need to talk to anybody.” She challenged me and said, “You’ve got to deal with it. You have to learn about your fear, but before you can do that you’ve got to acknowledge that the fear is real in your life. And then once you do that, then you can deal with the shame.” And I think that’s when it hit me. I was ashamed of the fact that here I was, Nik Wallenda – entertainer, daredevil, risk taker – and I’m supposed to be fearless…but I’m really not. I’m human. I’m real. I experience fear like anyone else. I had to work through all of those steps in order to work my way to that shame. Only then was I able to face the fear, deal with the fear, and then overcome that fear.
The book applies to my personal struggle with fear, but it is really written for people who are dealing with fear in their everyday lives. For example, I talk to people all the time who are miserable every day when they go to work. They do it because there is a paycheck on Friday and it covers the mortgage, but they really have dreams of a different occupation. Fear is preventing them from pursuing their dreams. What happens as a result? They prefer the status quo. They settle. I wrote this book because I wanted to inspire them. “Yes, you’re in a job that you don’t like. You have to be smart – you don’t want to walk away from your job without a plan, but you can take action and prepare for the job you really want.” My hopes are that people reading this book will use the lessons that I had to go through and apply it to real world situations in their own lives. If so, then they might not have to go as deep down in the valley as I did before reaching the mountaintop.
You mentioned preparation. That seems to be a key ingredient to conquering fear.
The amount of preparation that goes into what I do is incredible. Just to give you an example, my latest TV special was on ABC, where I walked over an active volcano – the Masaya Volcano, near Managua, Nicaragua. We studied volcanoes for four years as a team just to prepare for this event. We wanted to know the effects not only on the equipment, but also on the individuals who would be closest to volcano. We also worked with many volcanologists to understand this unpredictable environment as best we could, and then developed a training regimen based upon that science.
How do you train to walk across an active volcano?
We knew that I was going to have to wear a gas mask for this walk, and the science told us that wearing a gas mask would deprive my brain of oxygen. Actually, a gas mask can drop your oxygen level anywhere between 15-to-30%. So I trained on a wire that was the same length as what I would walk over the volcano, and I wore an oxygen deprivation mask that would cut my oxygen levels all the way down to 30%. That way, I was only breathing 30% oxygen during my practice walks. The logic being, if I could perform a walk with my oxygen level that low, then performing the walk at 70% oxygen was going to much easier.
The gases were a challenge in other ways. In fact, the gases were much stronger than anyone anticipated, including my team that had done all of the studies. There was a high degree of variability with this environment. We installed safety cables in that volcano crater that lasted two months before failure, and then we had some that started failing after 10 days. That’s because conditions inside a volcano change almost daily. Gas levels can be thicker from one day to the next, from one week to the next, so it was hard to predict what window we were going to be in. I not only trained with goggles to protect my eyes from the sulfuric gases, but I trained with goggles that were fogged up on purpose, so that I literally could not see through them. I wore special suits designed to keep me hot, so that my body would be prepared for the heat. I walked with weighted vests and also with the extra weight of an oxygen tank, in case the gases got so bad and that I needed oxygen. I walked the wire like this forwards and backwards, sometimes six times per training session. Oftentimes I’d practice with all of this gear on, walking a mile-and-a-half without stopping. That way I could prepare for those worst cases, so that when I am faced with them I’ve already been in much more difficult situations. It’s similar to somebody who is about to speak in front of a large group. The more you practice, the more comfortable you get. And the more comfortable you get, the better the chances of delivering a better message.
Does this training also help your concentration?
Yes, absolutely. A lot of training is about not being distracted. That was especially true for my walk over Times Square. There’s no greater distraction than all of those giant LED screens, people, taxis, and noise that you have going on in Times Square. So yeah, concentration is a huge part of it – training to not be distracted, and to stay focused. To be honest with you, I have a little bit of ADHD. My mind is everywhere sometimes. But when I’m on the wire, that’s the one place where I feel like I can stay extremely focused.
Let’s talk Niagara Falls. More than a hundred thousand in attendance, and millions watching on TV.
Niagara Falls took changing 100-year-old laws in two countries in order to get permission to walk over, so just the political part of that event was an overwhelming, monumental task. Then there was the training and the actual walk itself, followed by the network coming in last-minute and ordering me to wear a tether. That was something that I’d never done before. It’s like telling Tiger Woods that he’s got to use a specially weighted golf club instead of his trusty driver just before he tees off in a major. It’s going to throw him off because it’s different. It’s unique. And here I was, risking my life while people watching thought that the tether was going to save me. While that is true in in the purest sense, the reality is that a tether presented a risk as well. A tether could have caused me to fall. I could have gotten tangled up in it. The reality is, I’d trained for this walk without a safety. It was an extremely uncomfortable change, especially in a situation where I had never done it before and didn’t get to train with it on. But the network made the decision 10 days before the walk, and they were determined that I had to wear it. It was nonnegotiable.
What was the diameter of the wire you walked on?
I walked on a cable that was 2-inches in diameter, which was also different for me. My entire life, I had walked on a 5/8-inch wire rope, which is what I’m comfortable with to be honest with you. If someone came to me and said, “Do you want a 3-inch wire rope, 2-inch wire rope, or a 1-inch wire rope?” I would choose a 5/8-inch roped every time. It’s much smaller, obviously, but it’s where I feel at home.
What role does creativity play in preparing to walk something like Niagara Falls?
Creativity is a huge element. We actually brought in airboats to create strong winds, as well as fire trucks to simulate the heavy mist created by Niagara Falls. It’s really hard to simulate real world settings, but I have a great team of engineers and family members that are extremely creative.
A lot of my walks are creative in the sense that we are doing things never done before. There were many, many unique challenges like that when it came to walking over Niagara Falls. For example, we had these pendulum-type weights installed to keep the wire from twisting. What we learned at Niagara Falls, we took with us to help make the Grand Canyon walk a little bit safer. Then we took what we learned from the Grand Canyon experience and applied it to the volcano walk. So, we’re always learning, always pushing, and always being creative in our work.
Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Dick Clark Productions
Your faith is an important part of your identity. When you walked the Grand Canyon, you could be heard trusting each step to Jesus. How you use your faith to inspire and motivate others?
My faith is just like my wire walking. It’s who I am. I gave my life to Christ at three years old, so it’s really all I’ve ever known. I’m not preaching when I’m out there on the wire. When I’m on TV, I’m living my life. I think that’s why mainstream media respects it so much. There are no demands on our part to have the microphones on while I’m walking that wire. The networks could turn it off if they want, but they choose instead to keep it on. I think people respect that I’m not out there trying to change someone’s life or belief system. It’s just me being real, and that is what helps keep me calm. People are awestricken by the fact that I can stay that calm in those settings, but the Bible talks about a peace that passes all understanding. That is where I get my peace. If people’s lives are encouraged, inspired, or brought the faith because of that, then that’s me fulfilling my calling. Otherwise I just live my life by example, which is what the Bible calls us to do – to be Christlike. I don’t always succeed, but I try.
What have you been doing to stay relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic?
We opened up the drive-in thrill show, which has been a huge success. We’ve played a month now in two different cities, and have basically invited a bunch of my daredevil friends to perform with me. This is something we normally can’t do, because everyone is always booked up and performing elsewhere, but coronavirus changed all of that. So I called everyone up and said, “Hey let’s all get together and put on this awesome show.” People can drive onto a lot in their car, and the action takes place high above the ground. You can watch from the inside of your car, or the front of your car, and you can tune in to our radio station and see a great show. I speak from the wire for about 20 minutes, and use that time to hopefully motivate and encourage people during these crazy times.
(Photo by Michael Tran/FilmMagic)
Final Question: If you could offer one piece of advice to inspire and motivate others, what would that be?
I would tell you that God has blessed us all with powerful minds. We have the ability to control what we allow into our minds, and also what we allow out. We have the power to filter out the negative thoughts and replace these with positives. If I am on the wire and get hit with 43-mph winds, I can immediately counter that with the thought that I trained in 90. It is definitely something that you have to practice. Fear can overtake us. Fear can debilitate us. Or, if we learn to face our fear, it can empower us.