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March 1: OK, really, who does this?

  • Posted on: 1 March 2007
  • By: Michelle

Everyone thinks this warning sign at the top of the track is for tourists and teenage boys. It's not. It's for the athletes. Normal people don't need a sign posted at the top of a 1500m frozen water slide to tell them that crossing the start line will likely result in an injury.

So. My certain injury of the day: I fell off my sled AFTER I crossed the finish line. WHO DOES THAT? What, I can hold on to the damn sled at 110 kph, but when I slow down to speeds of, say, 30, I fall over?

It was snowing, again, today. It's been snowing for five days straight, which 1) Makes the track very slow; and 2) Makes the outrun very bumpy. Snow is allowed to collect in the outrun because it slows us down nicely once we pass the finish line. When there is a lot of snow, it tends to get pushed to sides of the outrun by the normal sliders who come up the middle. But what do we think of normal here in Bartlemanland?

So I cross the finish line (in an embarrassing and undisclosed amount of time) and start on my regular pattern of slowing from 100 kph to zero in a hundred metres or so. First I stick my legs out to the side and drop my toes. Then, as I near the exit dock I get up on my elbows so that I can see where I am (and so I can see my finish time on the clock). Then when I am just coasting I get up on my knees and lean back to put pressure on the grooves of my runners and be ready to stand up and pick up my sled quickly.

I did all of this, as normal, on my first run today. But when I got up on my knees my sled veered towards one of the sidewalls. Which generally isn't a problem - you just tap it and slow down quicker. Normally. Instead, with all the snow accumulated along the wall, I rode up the side of the wall and flipped over. In the outrun. No, really, WHO DOES THAT?

When I flipped I hit the opposite wall and totally crushed my shoulder, and as I rolled to a stop (no sliding to a stop here, it was more of a Jack-and-Jill-tumbled-up-the-hill) all I could think was "I didn't just dislocate my shoulder in the freakin' outrun, did I?" No worries, in my experience the crunches and pops that your body makes when falling off your sled at high speeds ... uh ... and low speeds ... are always worse than the injury itself.

So I am lying in the outrun, still thinking WTF? Nothing hurts too badly, so I sit up and watch the medic come running up the hill trying not to laugh at me. I eventually managed to pull myself together, realize I wasn't really hurt (other than that damn ego again) and drag my sled off the track, hoping to god this time that no one had actually seen me.

Of course, this is a BCS sliding session, the sessions where the Olympians and World Cup athletes come out to train, one of whom had certainly witnessed the acrobatic dismount of my sled. Can I say how much I appreciated his grace and understanding when he, after making sure I was still in one piece, launched into his own extreme outrun tale that included the track ending, his sled stopping and him continuing through the air?

So, I am going to go curl up into a ball now, nurse my sore shoulder and work out a game plan that includes me staying on my sled both before AND after the finish line tomorrow.

Really. Who does this kind of stuff?

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