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pavedwave longboarding
distance longboarding, flatland pumping, cross-country adventuring, boardwalk cruising, and all things skateboarding and good times
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dustm
Joined: 18 Oct 2007
Posts: 37
Location: Raleigh, NC
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 Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2009 11:28 pm Post subject: avoiding unnecessary risks? |
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From cross training/health section... | pavedwave wrote: | | ...while I find LDP to be less of a beating in general than running, it also dishes out some quick justice when you least expect it. It's just a miracle my wrists and knees aren't a little more severely mangled... |
I know a lot of those things are unavoidable law of averages falls, like kingpin breaks (luckilly have not had that happen to me), but a lot of falls could be avoided with some forethought and risk assessment. Some of these things are obvious but others can seem like an OK idea at first. I have tried to be more conscious to avoid unnecessary risk while skating after being dealt a few hard lessons!
One such lesson was learned riding in the dark, on what I thought was familliar terrain. This probably already sounds like one of the obviously bad ideas but the road has street lights that spill over quite a bit and I figured it'd be good to go. I had ridden this path a good number of times in the day, and knew where the bad spots were for the most part. Some gravel in a few areas and some other obstacles, but no bad expansion joints or holes to worry about. Besides i just got out of a 3 hour class and I want to skate darnit! It was about 8pm and I was skating home with a relatively heavy book bag... Notebooks, math book, etc. down like a bike path sidewalk. Its a mild hill that undulates up and down from road level, and curves around a decent distance from the side of the road, except at the intersections. There are 4 or 5 on the whole hill, and they are all very similar.
So you're riding on nice, smooth, grippy asphalt with just enough aggregate showing to make the urethane sing and then theres a benign looking crossing. A few offset gates distance before the intersecting road and the path transitions to concrete and brick arranged in cute squares and rectangles. Some of the crossings have brick planters with small trees along the side at that are built up off path level, and others have concrete medians (and more bricks) with occasional gravel scattered about. All of them, though, have, for lack of proper name, 'vehicular traffic prevention poles' standing in proud pairs at each opening of the path. They hinge at the bottom and feature a hasp for pad-locking in place.
Most of them are in the authoritative, upright postion... One would ASSUME that if one of the vtpp's were down that it would would lay in-line with the direction of theoretical traffic flow on the path, but this turns out to be false. I caught one of those jokers re-entering the path at the last intersection after a decent downhill. I thought I was dodging it, but it was darker in that area because of one of the planter trees blocking the street light, and at my rate of speed I only spied the base of the vtpp. I did not hit the base but I did hit the pole laying at a 45 across my path dead center. As my front wheels came to a halt against the barrier in slow motion, my thoughts changed quickly from (read it fast because they were instantaneous thoughs) "Wow, what was that loud KERPINK noise" to "I'm flying!" to "uuhhhooww i'm not going to land this well".
This was one of the few falls I've had where I had to lay there a minute to collect myself. Normally I instinctually try to jump to my feet, HA! I'm fine! See? But it knocked the wind out of me. I'm also pretty sure that after slamming me extra hard into the ground, my bookbag did one of those take you down moves where you bend over and it slides up over your head and knocks you off balance. I noticed how close to the planter I was, with its foot tall brick edge (lucky as hell I didnt munch that). My head was still on and I reconned that I wasn't broken so I caught my breath and stood up. A hip and my knees both hurt bad but nothing extraordiary, and just about everything else hurt too it seemed, as if each bone had crashed into the next in succession. I even messed up my ankle a bit, I suppose from it being forced sideways upon the initial impact of the board against the pole. I could walk around well enough and my roommate was waiting at the bottom of the hill to pick me up, so I gently skated down the remainder. The details of the rest of that night are not too pleasant, I got stuck in the tub realizing that for the time being I could not bear any weight on my knees. It was pretty obvious the next day that I should stay off it altogether, so I called in to work and just kinda chilled in bed for 24 hours. I was ok after that, just bruised and gun shy for the first critical weeks of healing.
Lesson learned! I have not ridden down that path again in the dark and I ride extra slowly if I can't see 100% of the ground in front of me. I also do not skate with more than a few light notebooks in my backpack. No laptop, no textbooks. Just breifly another bad idea is riding a new deck "just to check the flex real quick" without griptape as it starts to sprinkle a little bit. Your feet will grip just enough to get you hurt.
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kayakr
Joined: 19 Mar 2008
Posts: 35
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| Posted: Wed Mar 18, 2009 8:32 pm Post subject: owch |
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you can also get high output LED headlamps now cheap at Target.
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