Bear Grylls believes he’s ‘lucky’ after his parachute failed to open (Picture: Wall to Wall)
Adventure is so embedded in Bear Grylls it’s hard to imagine how different life could have been as the tv personality was once almost paralysed.
Bear, 49, has tackled Everest, Antartica, deadly bee stings, and even naked photoshoots over the years but his world could have followed another path after a parachuting accident years ago.
In 1996, the adventurer was serving in the Territorial Army with the SAS in Southern Africa and had been enjoying a well deserved holiday when his parachute failed to open.
He was left free falling and smashed into the dirt, breaking three of the vertebrae in his back in a shocking injury that threatened to end his active career.
‘It was a dark time,’ he shared recently on the Radio Times podcast, reflecting on his over two decades of reoccuring pain.
‘Physicality was such an inherent part of my life, my upbringing, my job in the military – and suddenly I couldn’t even reach a bathroom without being in agony.’
He spent 18 months recovering his strength (Picture: Karwai Tang/WireImage)
Bear, who was only in his early 20s at the time, spent 18 months fighting to recover his strength but his outlook on life had changed.
He continued: ‘I had an awareness that I was lucky – I should have been paralysed. I was within millimetres of severing my spinal cord.
‘I’d been given a second chance, and it gave me a gratitude for life that I didn’t have before.’
Two years after his spinal injury, at 23 years old, Bear became one of the youngest people to ever climb Everest.
Despite his adventuring, the star still suffers from back pain from the injury as well as shoulder pain from another accident in which he broke it.
Bear has worked alongside numerous Hollywood faces on expeditions (Picture: National Geographic/Backgrid)
Bear is well aware that his job is risky, especially as a dad to three sons; Jesse, 21, Marmaduke, 17, and Huckleberry, 14.
He added: ‘There is always risk involved in my job. You’ve got to be smart. In the wild, you only get it wrong once. You have to leave ego behind.
‘If there’s any doubt about safety, you find another way. On Running Wild, I take rookies with me. They might be Hollywood celebrities, but they’ve never climbed a mountain – and you’ve got to account for that.’
Bear has worked with everyone from Barack Obama to Zac Efron to Kate Winslet on his popular adventure show, which he is taking on a live tour.
Despite conquering the challenges of outdoors, he did admit the live show makes him a little nervous sometimes but believes nerves are a good thing and ‘keeps us sharp’.
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It almost ended his career