Recap at the start of the post-intro section opens with… a female grunting rather loudly. Thanks, Biggest Loser!

What happens in the super exciting extreme kiwi sheeprooting challenges tonight? Read on to find out!

Shannan says their time in New Zealand is for their spiritual challenge, to find and face their deepest darkest fear, so they can look at themselves in the mirror afterwards without any fear.

Kimberlie’s getting a chat with Shannan first about all this and she’s said her biggest fears are running, which they’ve done, stairs which they’ve definitely done… And inclines. Which Kim tries to say they’ve just done, but Shannan disagrees and says that’s not enough. So they’ve decided they’re going to take her rock climbing. Cool!
Up a vertical cliff face. Which sounds very cool to me, but Kim looks a tad bit scared!

Courtney’s biggest fear is a fear of heights, which he’s said to everyone, apparently.
So Courtney’s challenge is a canyon swing! Jump off a platform and swing down 60 metres and down through a canyon. “Completely harnessed!”
Courtney says he’s not just going to do it, he has to do it.

Courtney gets to head off with Michelle from the house a while later. As they’re heading out to the car, Michelle is reassuring him that he’ll be fine. Courtney proves he can actually be a gentleman from time to time, by allowing Michelle into the car first – “After you!”
He also says that he knows he won’t die, but he might have a heart attack or something. Michelle says that at least he’ll look good doing it!
Courtney’s trying to be calm about it all, trying to suppress his nervousness and how scared he was.

Apparently the swing Courtney is doing is the biggest one in the world.
Courtney’s biggest fear is heights, but he also has issues with trusting people, so the canyon swing is a good test for both.

109 metre fall, 60 metre free fall, 200 metre radius on the swing. We see a girl do it first and she shrieeeeeeeks all the way down, then some more at the bottom, and again on the way up. Oh dear!
“Who does this shit for fun? I bet you do, don’t you?” – Courtney, looking at the instructor guy.
Michelle is unsure if he’ll actually go through with it as he starts looking more and more nervous as he gets closer and closer to having to go through with it.

Michelle tells him he’s got to stand on the edge of the ledge and lean back and absorb where it is he’s about to go. The possibility of the unknown isn’t going to kill him, it’s somewhere he can grow. Which Courtney agrees with.
But he’s still struggling with it a lot. “I can’t do it.” “You’re there. Just look at me, relax.” Etc etc.
Michelle says she wants Courtney to get a sense of self-worth out of the jump. She wants him to feel brave and courageous.
Courtney’s worried that the harness might not hold his weight, because he’s been turfed off amusement rides and suchlike before because he was just too big. Given that he really doesn’t weigh any more than a tall, fit athlete now, I don’t think he’s got much to worry about. If it was Damien I doubt they would even let him put the harness on!

They get a very nice photo of him on the edge before the jump where he’s looking petrified.

“You can do this, man! Lean back, push off with your feet and just go with it!” – Michelle

Have to say at this point I was cheering for him to go ahead with it and he finally starts swearing his head off and says alright, I’m going for it and he just starts leaning back and falls off the edge. He freaks out quite a bit on the start of the way down but as he nears the bottom of the swing you can tell he’s starting to really enjoy it. At one point during the pendulum swings he shouts up to Michelle, “That was incredible, Michelle!”
Courtney says he was feeling happy, feeling free, feeling like “The New Me”, if you want to call it that.
“From here on in, brand new Courtney.”

I think I see why they’ve done it with 6 people this year – way more “n’awwwwwwwwwwwww!” moments!

Kim is afraid of heights, afraid of falling and afraid of failing. So she’s having to face up to a number of different fears all in one by having to climb a rockface!
Shannan says that in order to be a good climber you have to be able to control your emotions and have good mental clarity.
Kim looks up at the rockface when she gets there and thinks it’s ridiculous. She says that Shannan thinks things like that are there to be conquered, whereas Kim doesn’t see the need, she doesn’t think that that is why such things exist.

Shannan’s actually doing the climb with her on the way up, giving lots of encouragement and instruction.
Kim’s main worry is that she doesn’t have the physical strength to get all the way up.
She has a real fear of falling and at one point she starts to fall back and of course the rope catches her, but she still freaks out and starts swearing her head off. Shannan is just shocked at her reaction, to have that much fear and anger built up inside when faced with such a simple problem.
Shannan wants her to face it as much as possible.
About 3/4 of the way up she starts screaming “no!” to continuing any further. Shannan says the odds were stacked against her completing the climb. “This is a stupid idea!” – Kim
Shannan asks her to look him in the eyes and she can’t because she’s all over the place, but eventually he gets her to calm down enough to continue on.
The further up they get, Shannan says, the more control she gets. The guy has the patience of a saint, encouraging and pushing her all the way, while still having to handle the climb himself!
Eventually she makes it and screams in victory as she gets to the top and she feels really proud of herself.
Shannan says that she now knows there’s a “control” button in there. She can shout and scream and lose it, or she can shout and scream but keep it under control like she did towards the end of the climb.
Kim says that that sort of thing is exactly what she needs from the show – she doesn’t need the money, or the fame, she needs the confidence in herself and her body to get to the end.

Chris wakes up feeling much better than he has the last couple of days. Shannan’s picked out an activity that he and Michelle think would most challenge him.
Chris’ challenge is “fly-by-wire”. It’s basically a tiny little “plane”, giant jet engine on the back (it’s actually just a fan with a cowling…) attached to two wires, one for guidance and the other to pull him up to a nice height before letting him go to swoop downwards at great speed. Doesn’t touch the ground, if you get a perfect turn at one end of the pendulum you can actually pick up speed on the way back down, so you could, presumably, just keep going back and forth all day… Or until you run out of fuel, at least.

Chris’ problem started because he was training for a big tour of basketball stuff, pushing much too hard, feeling bad but kept training hard. Eventually wound up in hospital and they told him he couldn’t do any running or anything like that for 6 months. So he was shattered, because he loved his hospital.

Shannan explains that the fly-by-wire doesn’t require going flatchat all the time, you’ll miss your turn and the speed will decrease and eventually you’ll have to start all over again. He says in an aside that it’s not about 1 second of bravery, it’s about learning control and being sensitive to what’s going on around you.
He tells Chris once he’s strapped in that the fly-by-wire can reach speeds of 150-170km/h. He wants Chris to tell him how he’s feeling when he comes down. If he’s feeling frustrated, Shannan wants Chris to tell him.
Chris thinks he probably will be because it won’t be doing what he wants it to do and he’ll go mental with the machine. Shannan said you need finesse and patience and Chris says he finds those things pretty hard.

The pull-rope lets go and Chris heads downwards, “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu……..”
His first turn is pretty woeful. First attempt is only up around 95km/h, coming down sidewards sometimes, even backwards one time. He’s still having a ball, as is Shannan.
As he goes on, he gets better and better, during some of the later turns he starts feeling a bit giddy but he kept pushing on trying to ignore it. Shannan says that out of nowhere Chris took his hand off the throttle and Chris goes back and forth with his hands hanging down (as we’ve seen on the ads) but he responds to Shannan when Shannan asks what happened. He tells him he feels like he’s going to pass out.
In a side interview he says he was thinking “Come on reject, just grab the accelerator, do it again and finish this.”
They get the medic up to look at him because he’s looking really pale. The medic says to him that seeing as he’s been sick the last couple of days and he’s not doing so well now it’d probably be best if he didn’t go up again.

Shannan tells him not to think of it as giving up, he’s not giving up, it’s better to back off and stay healthy, rather than push through as he would have done before and really fallen back off the wagon again. Chris says that that is what he would’ve done before, he would’ve pushed through and kept going on the fly-by-wire. Shannan grins and says, “It’s working, mate!”
Shannan says he thinks Chris is starting to understand that you don’t have to flog yourself, you don’t have to come first all the time, sometimes it’s about how you handle yourself. There’s no point getting to the top but standing on everyone’s fingers on the way – “you want to get to the top and take some people with you.”

Tomorrow night Munnalita looks to be doing a bungee jump, Pati seems to be jumping into a river and Damien… is doing the rockclimbing? Crikey! Stay tuned!