This is the Guardian. Hello my name is Claire Longrick I'm the deputy editor of the long read.

Over the Christmas season we're going to be celebrating by bringing you a few of our

favorite long reads of the year.

One of the great things about working on the long read is that we tackle all kinds of subjects

from the big topic everyone is

talking about whether it's war or natural disasters or tiny worlds that few people

have discovered. A rich source of stories are things like hobbies outside the mainstream, like collecting

rare lilies or papyrus obsessives and extreme sports whose participants drive themselves beyond normal human endurance.

We've done ploughing championships, fell running and now cliff diving.

Cliff diving is a sport that requires intense training, raptor-like focus

and obviously extreme courage or madness.

It runs parallel to Olympic high diving,

although some of its greatest sportsmen and women have competed in both.

When Sandrise came to us with the idea of following a top cliff diver through a tough season, we obviously jumped at it.

We didn't know whether this guy, Gary Hunt, was going to be a great character, but Zahn was promising to let us into a world we knew nothing about,

in which competitors dive 26 meters off a cliff, into an area of sea about the size of dustbin lid. It was just too good to miss.

The opening lines bring you straight into this slightly insane world and the details are fantastic.

Zand describes how the divers they're jumping off something the height of an 8-story

building and they do all those twists and turns and

summer soles that you see in Olympic high diving competitions but they're going

from so high up that there are swimmers in the water slapping the water so that the diver as they

hurtle down towards the sea can tell which is sea and which is sky. Our hero is an

...