Don't Break Your Wrist During Quarrantine

By, Atom

Imagine you are going down a steep mountain going fast on a snowboard. Some can find it extremely fun, and some don’t. Originally, I believed in the latter. I used to just ski and didn’t surf, One Wheel, carver board, or snowboard. Board sports were a totally new thing to me that I never was very interested in. 

At the time, I took skateboarding lessons. A friend of mine or two would come over and skateboard with me. We had an instructor that was very good at skateboarding. There was one problem with the way we were skateboarding: the ramp we were practicing on was much too tall. It was more than twice my height at the time. Being 5, I was about 3’6”, and the vert ramp was maybe around 8 feet tall. Because the ramp was so high, it had to be long too. This meant to get to the other side of the ramp, you had to start at the very top.

Being 5 years old, this was very ominous for me. Having to stand at the top of an 8 ft ramp with no experience and go down it on a skateboard, it was terrifying. We never ended up going off the top of that ramp. We had tried several times to go back and forth from the bottom of the ramp, but it was too long, and I never ended up getting enough momentum to consistently go back and forth. This issue caused skateboarding to be boring and repetitive, because if I attempted to do any tricks or anything cool, I would lose momentum and stop. The coach was helping me but it was still boring. I generally started losing interest in skateboarding. A few months later, we ended up canceling lessons. This was the period of time when I entirely stopped doing board sports. 

Maybe six months after stopping skateboarding, I learned about a new mode of transportation that was a board sport called a One Wheel. It is a mix of a skateboard and a snowboard that uses a motor to keep moving without needing any external force. I loved it because it didn’t require a lot of energy to go. All I had to do was stand up, lean to one side, and balance. Despite not needing much energy, I still found it very hard and complicated, and to this day, despite riding it consistently, I still am not very good at it. There was one problem with the One Wheel, though. It wasn’t very safe. It would stop balancing if you were going too fast or just stop and throw you off it. Just recently, Josh Burke got thrown off a One Wheel and broke his wrist. One time, I was one wheeling to a friend’s house and it threw me off. I got a little hurt. Since then, I haven’t really felt very safe on a One Wheel. I didn't do One Wheel very consistently after that. I didn’t quit though. 

I had been surfing pretty much since I was four. I did it during trips, and one time I did lessons in Pacifica. I never really loved surfing, but I still felt like iIt was a fun thing to do when I wasn’t feeling tired. 

I encountered snowboarding when a friend had convinced me to start. This made me stop skiing. I snowboarded during weekends during the winter, and I wasn’t very good at it. I was still very young at the time. I was still working on my turning. At one point I felt that I really got the turning down, and then I caught an edge on an icy surface and got a concussion. This didn’t stop me though. It did slow down my progress a little but I still kept snowboarding.

Another note on  surfing, I ended up catching a pretty big wave (for me at the time.) It was maybe around 5 feet tall during a trip. This made me a bit more excited for surfing. 

Then quarantine hit. We decided to stay in Montana, which is where we normally ski and snowboard. This only worked because of online school. I was getting snowboarding lessons pretty frequently and this I got a lot better at it but I still wasn’t great. Then, I was still only doing black diamond runs. After that we stopped doing lessons and I progressed a little more. Then I was able to do some of the hardest black runs on the mountain. To this day, I still don’t want to do any double blacks. Then, one day, I wasn’t snowboarding very well, and the snow was very icy. As the cold winds came through, we decided that we would take it easy that day. We decided to do a pretty easy tree run. I was not doing great because I was a snowboarder in the tight trees, but I was still fine. I ran into a tree at a low speed, and I was okay. At this point, I made a mental note that when we got to the bottom of the run, I would go home. 

When we were getting out of the trees on the way to the main run, I noticed the snow was unusually icy. We were going sideways across a small hill on the way to the groomed run which was a little below that hill. I made sure that I was standing really angled on my toeside. I kind of slid down a little bit and came off of the of the groomed run into the main run. Because it was icy, I had sideways momentum. When I landed on the groomed run, the sideways momentum made me land flat and catch my heelside edge. This caused me to start falling over. I put my arms behind me to brace my fall, which probably wasn’t a very good Idea now that I think about it. This made me fall on my wrist and break it. 

We went to the hospital, which wasn’t very good because it was the very start of quarantine, and I had to get a cast.  I had to wait a few months or so, not being able to snowboard. It was pretty boring because I couldn’t be that active. When it was time to get my cast off, my family didn't want to go to the hospital because of COVID, so my dad bought a cast saw he found  on Amazon. Then, we cut the cast off. It was overall pretty stressful but it ended up being just fine.

A little while later, we went back home, and I did a lot of One Wheeling after I got my cast off because I don’t really like many other activities. We decided we were going to try to get into Fiji because it had a surprisingly low rate of COVID, and my mom really wanted to go surfing. She really likes surfing. We had to wait a month or so before we could finally go. Once we got there, we planned to stay there for a while. 

When I was at home, I discovered carver boarding. It is like skateboarding, but it also has a surfing element added onto it where you can turn to get momentum. The turns were also quicker. Whenever I had the opportunities to One Wheel, there was also the right conditions to One Wheel.

While in Fiji, I did a lot of surfing, and when I didn’t feel like surfing, there were a lot of nice places where I could ride a One Wheel. In Fiji, we also had to deal with a hurricane, but that is a different story. We ended up staying there for about a year. I got a lot better at surfing, and now I find it a lot more fun than I did before. I also got a lot better at being safe on the One Wheel. 

This is my experience with board sports and why I had no social interaction for a year. This is also why you shouldn’t break your wrist during quarantine because having to cut your own cast with scissors and a cast saw isn’t that fun. Board sports are very important to my identity because it is something I really enjoy and spend a lot of my time on. It is also important to my identity because it is something I spend a lot of time thinking about.