That's how Jeff Henderson started his Broke Da Foot post last year.
Maybe not full time for 29 years, but I've been windsurfing for quite some time too and here we go, here's my Broke Da Foot post! (sorry Jeff, I had to copy the pose of the photo too...)
How did I do it?
The usual: mistimed a hit to the lip (it was around 6pm and the glare from a very low sun almost blinded me) and the lip sneaked under my board and kind of exploded there. In other words, the lip hit the bottom of my board instead of my board hitting the lip. Subtle but big difference. I didn't see it coming (because of the glare) and I wasn't ready for the impact, which I though would have happened a couple of feet higher and a fraction of second later.
The hard part was to schlog back to the beach (quite upwind from where I was).
Fortunately there were still a bunch of local sailors when I landed and they carried me to my car, derigged my gear and gave me some ice: thanks a lot guys!
Got to love automatic transmission in this cases...
Foot injuries are so common in windsurfing that I always considered it just a matter of time before it happened to me. And I was so ready for that, that I'm not even bummed!
Well, first of all, as you can see from the x-rays below, the fractures are so small that if there weren't those little arrows it would be hard to see them.
The bones have kept their integrity. There's only a few cracks... like dings on the rails of a surfboard.
So, it could have been A LOT worse.
The x-ray that was on the screen of the doctor's computer before he showed me mine, for example, showed a huge metal plate with something like 10 screws inside someone's leg. That made me think of Matt Pritchard's injury or all those gnarly ones that Polakow has picked up in many years.
Guess what, both of them are still windsurfing and ripping... mine is going to be a piece of cake.
Just an extended period of rest (didn't need a cast, but can't put weight on it for a month), at the end of which I'll be pretty stoked to get in the water again.
What, no carbon crutches for GP?
Here's a list of things that helped me accepting the injury with ease:
1) it's the end of the winter season. The best winter wave-wise since I'm here. Had it happened at the beginning or in the middle of it, it would have been a lot worse. I could have missed waves like this.
2) it will give me the opportunity to do something different. Like playing Ukulele, for example.
Dedicated to all the windsurfers out there.
This is the original.
3) it happened while doing one of the things I like most.
To minimize the risk of getting injured, once in the forties I pretty much decided not to jump. But riding waves and hitting lips... that's what it's all about and the risk of injuries is part of the game.
Had it happened while coming down a staircase it would have been a bit harder to accept... or doing arm wrestling (!), like it happened to this one guy in Italy, live on one of those horrible TV shows.
WARNING: the video shows his arm breaking which is a pretty damn horrible thing to watch, so it's not recommended if for people sensitive to these kind of things. Here's the video.
PS. In case you didn't notice, this is another example of "everything is possible": I'm out of the water for two months and I'm not even bummed... unbelievable.
I'm absolutely loving the level of my... how to call it... maturity, detachment, enlightenment?
Day after day, there seem to be less and less things in this world that have the power to alter my natural state of happiness.
I'm way more proud of my skills in this field than in any other water sports, that's for sure.
Might have to start a blog called Mauizenreport...
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