Warning: Not for the faint of heart

Today's guest writer is Dan.

I am officially going through a midlife crisis. OK, maybe not, but recently I've been thinking I wanted to try something new. You might be thinking knitting, or writing short stories, or some other simple thing. You would be wrong. I have been wanting to pick up skateboarding for my commute. I was thinking -- certainly like any level headed man of my age who has only skateboarded less than a handful of times in his life -- that a skateboard would be a perfect thing.

"Why not a bike?", you might ask.

Bah! That kind of thinking leads to offering a cane to a man with a limp, a crutch to a child with a sprained ankle, or a walker to an elderly lady (I picked those analogies carefully). In other words, it's like offering help to someone who has a handicap. I have no handicap.

Well, at least not a physical one.

Well, at least I had no physical handicap.

I researched skateboards and decided on a longboard. They have bigger, softer wheels, which roll over rocks and sidewalk cracks easier. They are also longer and typically wider which offers more foot space which can help in balancing. Then I found out a friend of mine had one. He let me borrow his so I could try it without having to invest any money if I decided it wasn't going to work.

Now that I think about it, maybe he was trying to kill me off. :)

So today, I took the longboard to work. Our house is on a hill. Not a particularly steep hill. OK, our neighbor's second floor windows look into our first floor windows. The point is, I wasn't riding down the Matterhorn. In either case, it didn't take long for me to attain a relatively high velocity, at which point I started to wobble.

Before proceeding, let me reiterate that I had researched this. I knew how to stop. I knew how to slow down. I knew that doing either of those things is the easiest way to get out of the wobble. Now let us proceed, because I didn't do either of those things. No, I just jumped off running. This is where the rubber hit the road. And by rubber I mean my hands, and by hands I mean hands and knees, and by hands and knees I mean hands, knees and chest. And by road I mean road.

Those with weak constitutions are now advised to keep reading and suck it up (much like I did).

I stood up and assessed the damages. These consisted of a cut on my right hand, a cut and a scrape on my left, and both knees had scratches. I also got to watch the longboard roll down the hill. Then I looked back at my left hand, which was hurting. That's when I noticed that I didn't have just a simple scrape. A 2x2 inch piece of skin had been entirely stripped away and pieces of it were hanging off. So I tore those off.

Many men would proceed home to clean it up (I was only 200 feet away). I am only one man, which is to say that I am not many men, which is to say I went to work. The bleeding stopped pretty quickly, surprisingly. It was the pus that continued on for quite some time. To make an increasingly longer story short again, I cleaned and dressed the wound at work with some supplies from the first aid station. I also rode the longboard home after work.




So in conclusion, I had lots of fun. It was unfortunate that my first injury was on my first ride. I enjoyed it enough that I will probably do it again. I'm in enough pain that I will probably not do it again for a while, and when I do, I will wear gloves.