ABSTRACT
In this chapter Krein argues that nature sports, such as backcountry skiing and snowboarding, climbing, and surfing, are similar to traditional sports in that they share a certain type of intensity: physical and mental effort is regularly exerted at levels that would seem exaggerated in most other aspects of our lives and we experience heightened level of awareness and meaning. Leslie Howe has argued that the use of “intensity,” as presented in Krein’s earlier work, is linked to the Kantian idea of the sublime in nature. Much of this chapter is devoted to clarifying the concept of intensity and arguing that the experiences of nature sports athletes are better interpreted as experiences of flow than as experiences of the sublime.
