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Resumen

Introduction Extreme leisure activities are of all sorts. They have been dened as those activities in which individuals experience leisure dierently, due to their being taken to the limit of their resources. These activities can range from ‘abnormal’ leisure, such as unprotected anal intercourse, to extreme sports. They have been seen as allowing the individual to experience transcendence beyond the mundane and everyday, with a suggestion that such pursuits aord a particular glimpse into the human condition (see Blackshaw, 2009). For those of us seeking new directions in this area of Leisure Studies, extreme sports are a rich resource. The focus in this chapter, therefore, is on extreme sporting activities, on which, since the 1980s, there has been theoretical and empirical work on the more established alternative sports such as skateboarding, rock climbing and surng, whilst activities such as windsurng, snowboarding, BMX biking, extreme ironing, extreme skiing, ultimate Frisbee, kitesurng, in-line skating, parkour, whitewater kayaking and adventure racing have also been dened as alternative sports as the category has both expanded and diversied.