I am a very pedestrian risk-taker.
I love touching stoves to test if they are hot and poking cacti to see if the spikes hurt.
Low-level chaos excites me, but at the end of the day I am content with the lack of danger in my life.
When it comes to adrenaline, I am mostly unfamiliar with the chemical. Growing up, I always took the safest route and never dared to test my limits.
Once, on school camp, I had the opportunity to abseil. Instead I cried, took my gear off and walked the long way down the cliff.
Somehow each choice I had made in life since then had led me to the cockpit of a rally car at Whare Flat yesterday, terrified yet eager to find out what I had been missing.
I shook my driver’s hand and asked his name, but between the bark of the engine and the padded helmet I did not hear a single syllable.
I later found out he was Raana Horan, nationally ranked driver and entrant in the Otago Rally.
Despite the noise, I did manage to achieve a brief conversation with him.
"You have to promise me we won’t die."
"That would be good," he replied.
And that was it.
I was strapped in with a seatbelt designed remarkably like that in my nephew’s booster seat and we headed to the starting line. I braced myself.
It turned out I did not brace myself enough. Raana put his foot to the floor while mine were pulled into the air by the force of the car.
My whole body was possessed by speed and I was thrown back and forth.
The trees seemed to be coming towards us awfully quickly. I realised this was not quite a leisure drive.
I could not control the car, our speed, or when these corners were coming up, but I could control my body.
The first point of order was my flailing feet, which floated aimlessly through the air. I planted them firmly on the metal plate before me.
The next step was to try to keep my head still. I pressed my head back into the seat and steadied myself, but found that just caused the vibrations to spread throughout my skull instead.
The final step was ... well, it turned out there was not much else I could do.
I realised I was in the co-driver’s seat, which meant nobody was guiding Raana around these corners.
Instead he was relying on memory to direct our speeding metal cocoon in a direction that did not mean death.
The panic continued and before I knew it we passed by the flags marking the end of the course.
Raana turned to me, laughed, and made a joke about my feet flying about.
He pulled the car up and we shook hands, his sweaty, mine bone-cold.
I stepped out of the car. The ground felt wobbly and my body was shaking.
Raana said we had "only" gone about 140kmh.
We laughed and he told me a bit about the car, but my head was too full of adrenaline to make sense of it.
All of my thoughts had been left behind on the road and I was left walking away from the car with nothing but a smile.
