At 8:30 this morning David Blaine began his latest stunt called “Dive of Death,” where he will hang six stories upside-down in the air over Central Park in New York City. His goal is to hang there for 60 hours, which means he will potentially drop to the ground at 11pm on Wednesday. When those hours are up, he will make a “death dive” to the ground.

Dr. Ronald Ruden, Blaine’s physician, told ABC News that when he first heard the name of the stunt, “It scared the crap out of [him].”

“How he does this, I’m not 100 percent sure,” Ruden said. “He seems to have the ability to use his mind to control his body to not experience pain and discomfort, as well as take away his basic drives to eat and sleep and defy his fear.”

“We don’t even know what the physiology of this is,” Ruden said with a laugh. “I hate that.”

Blaine was asked his reasoning behind this stunt, to which he responded on Good Morning America right before he was hoisted into the air that he always found images of Harry Houdini hanging upside down “compelling to look at.”

Houdini dangled upside down wearing a straight jacket and tried to escape as quickly as possible, but Blaine’s niche is testing his endurance, so, of course, he needed to add that element to his stunt.

“I always liked that idea of being upside down,” Blaine said. “So I started experimenting on how long could somebody actually be put upside down. And there was no documentation of it. Nobody really had research on it. I invited doctors to kind of look and watch me as I was doing experiments. And although the dangers are high, I think there’s a way to override that. ”

There are a couple of heath risks that are concerning doctors with Blaine’s stunt. Blaine will not be eating or sleeping during this stunt. He will be hooked up to a catheter for all his needs. And doctors not involved with the stunt say there are definite risks involved with his attempt. There is chance that he could go blind or suffer a stroke.

Blaine said he has prepared for the challenges of the 2½-day hang by losing some weight, performing special exercises and practicing dangling upside down (duh).

“He’s practiced a lot, but I’m not sure how long he has done it,” Ruden said. “I’m pretty certain that the longest he has done it so far is around six hours.”

Here are some pictures of David Blaine and Kelly Ripa “hanging” out together upside down.

Catch the two-hour ABC TV special on Wednesday, September 24th, 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. (ET).

Magician David Blaine set a new world record today on The Oprah Winfrey Show for holding his breath under water for 17 minutes and 4 seconds. The previous record of 16 minutes 32 seconds was set earlier this year in Switzerland by Peter Colat.

Here is one part of the diary kept by David Blaine as he prepared himself for this life changing moment.

For the stunt, Blaine wearing a clad in a silver wet suit, entered an acrylic sphere filled with 1,800 gallons of water and spent the first 23 minutes inhaling pure oxygen, packing his lungs with extra oxygen just before the breathing tubes were removed.Just moments after setting the record, 35 year old Blaine said that this was “a lifelong dream,” of his.  “I can’t believe that I did that.”

“I actually started to doubt I was going to make it because I’d never done it with such a high heart rate,” he added. His aides said during the event that his heart rate should have dropped far lower than it did.

 
In May 2006, as a finale to a week spent in an aquarium with an oxygen mask at New York’s Lincoln Center, Blaine tried to set a new breath-holding record. Without breathing pure oxygen beforehand, he tried to break the existing record of 8 minutes, 58 seconds for an attempt of that type.

But he had to be rescued shortly after 7 minutes when he was unconscious and having convulsions.