I Fell

I didn’t realize how long it had been since my last blog entry. The last couple of months have flown by and I’m not sure why. The big, not so exciting, news with me is that I was out skating around my neighborhood about a month ago and fell. I fell hard. I fell so hard that I thought I broke my hip and went in to have x-rays done. I didn’t break anything. I won’t share any pictures with you, as you don’t want to see my road rash and bruises because you may never skate again if you saw them. I bruise easily so it probably looked extra scary.

I was out for an easy skate and was feeling good. I have a 2-mile loop that I do around the neighborhoods around my house. It was newly paved a few years back so the pavement is still nice. I was turning from one street to another and had to skate through a little gutter and them BAM! I am on the ground in the middle of the road. I am not even sure what happened. It happened that fast. I didn’t stumble or lose my balance. I just fell. I was very aware I was in the middle of the road so I got up quickly and moved to the side of the road to collect myself. I never lay on the ground when I am hurt. It’s been a thing with me since I was a little girl. My very first roller speed skating coach, Kim, taught me from the very beginning that if I didn’t have blood or a broken bone that I was not to lay on the floor screaming and crying when I fell. So I never did. Even when I was bleeding, I still got up. I was lucky to have never broken any bones while skating. When I became a coach I told my skaters that same rule. I know it hurts to fall but you always get right back up and keep going. There is a really good story there that one of my former skaters could share. I’ll save that for another time. Let’s just say that she did actually have something broken but I didn’t know it and was on the sidelines trying to get her to continue to skate. I wasn’t mean, I swear.

Back To My Story

I was obviously crying after I fell. I’m a tough person but when things hurt, I cry. The asphalt is hard and rough and doesn’t do nice things to your skin when you fall on it. I’m also a big girl so when I went down, I went down hard and landed on mostly my hip and a little on my elbow and hand. I let out a nice profanity when I fell. It just came out. It makes me laugh a little bit about it now. I got up and started to roll away and realized my skate buckle was broken and not attached to my skate any longer. I skated back to pick it up from the middle of the road. I was only a half a mile from my house so I proceeded to skate home. My husband was about to leave for a bike ride when I left so I pulled out my phone and tried to call him to tell him not to leave so he could clean me up when I got home. He was able to clean my wounds and wrap me all up and I proceeded to lie in bed for the rest of the weekend.

None of that was fun by any stretch of the imagination but today I went and skated for the first time since my fall. I wasn’t nervous or anxious at all. I did pay a little more attention to those same gutters. It wasn’t my first fall and it won’t likely be my last fall. I got back up and got back out there. I actually had a nice short skate today. Dusted off the cobwebs and look forward to skating again in a couple of days. Never give up, right??!!