Martha Stewart Meets the X Games

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Extreme Ironing:

Clawing up ice-crusted, razor-sharp mountain peaks can get a little boring. And dangling upside down from a bungee cord over jagged cliffs is, face it, rather ho-hum.

But now there's a way to add excitement, a dash of danger, the adrenaline rush of risk: Take along an ironing board, a sturdy steam iron and a load of wrinkled shirts.

It's not for the faint of heart, to be sure. But extreme ironing - the marriage of activities like cliff jumping and kayaking treacherous rapids with what participants call"the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt" - has been catching on...

...."Our aim is to have the level of recognition that it becomes an Olympic sport," he said."If you can have synchronized swimming and curling, I think extreme ironing has as much to offer."

It would be the first Olympic sport in which the athletes did not use their real names."In order to avoid the ridicule of our peers," Mr. Shaw and his compadres adopt pseudonyms, he wrote in a how-to book,"Extreme Ironing." Mr. Shaw is Steam. Others are Cool Silk, Iron Mike, Fe (the chemical symbol for iron), Jeremy Irons and Iron Lung.

The first Extreme Ironing World Championship was held in Germany in 2002 and was judged by a white-gloved panel of German homemakers. (A second world championship could come soon.) Eighty teams from 10 countries competed on an obstacle course arrayed in the shape of an iron, pressing boxer shorts and blouses while scaling a climbing wall, hanging from a moss-covered tree branch and squeezing under the hood of a car...

...The actual ironing does count."Ironists," Mr. Shaw wrote in his book,"are sometimes so absorbed in getting themselves into some sort of awkward or dangerous situation with their ironing board that they forget the main reason they are there in the first place: to rid their clothing of creases and wrinkles." The quality of the pressing counts for 60 of 120 points. Style counts for 40 points and speed 20.

Mr. Shaw's team took a gold medal, as did a German contestant, Hot Pants, who won a trip to Hawaii."She really took care on her collars and cuffs," said Short Fuse, a k a Penny Wilkerson, who is on the American tour along with Starch (Matthew Patrick) and Steam...

...Shirts have been pressed from Everest to the Brazilian rain forest, on bicycles and scuba dives. One of the few American ironists once cut an iron-shaped hole in a frozen lake in Wisconsin. But his shirt, upon surfacing, froze.

Next week, Mr. Shaw's crew will iron on Mount Rushmore and among alligators and bison.

Sorry.