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Rook Nelson is the co-director and owner of SkyDive Chicago and has been skydiving since he was 4

Since then, he's been inducted into the International Skydiving Hall of Fame and has completed more than 26,000 jumps, won 13 world titles and claimed 18 national championships

He's also a cancer survivor and says his diagnosis with squamous cell carcinoma tested his sense of mortality more than jumping out of airplanes ever has

When Rook Nelson was just 4 years old, his dad rigged him into a hang-gliding harness, clipped him in with carabiners and sent them both tumbling out of a plane — high, high, high up in the clouds.

This was the mid 1980s and tandem skydiving hadn’t been popularized yet, so his father, Roger, adjusted accordingly by stuffing carpet padding into the l

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