Never Knows Best

$Found Some Old Photos These are from 2006 from a fall I took bombing a hill on my skateboard. Some friends took us there when we were out street skating after they found out that we skated downhill every Friday night, so of course I thought i would show off and just start going down without any questions as soon as we got to the top… Apparently my friend Andrew had the same idea… So with Andrew leading in front of me, the both of us just took off. The hill had two parts; the first was long and mellow, the second part took a very sharp 90 degree turn into about a 45 degree slope that went for maybe a quarter of a mile. The start of the hill was at the top of one of the mountains here in Arizona and started off really mellow at about a 10 degree slope for the first part of it. The first thing i noticed was all the loose gravel on the ground so i was watching my feet and not paying much attention to Andrew. But I new the sharp turn was coming up soon so I looked up to see Andrew on the ground. He didn’t make the turn, slipped out, and was on the ground holding his head, the only things that went through my mind was, ‘sweet, I’m fucking riding this hill to the end’. So I went full tuck and took the sharp 90 degree right hand turn as hard and as fast as I could (grabbing my board front-side for some extra leverage to aid that) and stayed tucked for as long as I could… That is until a car pulled into the road… As soon as the car turned into my path I started to come out of my tuck and try to get myself out of the way. Almost instantly I started to get speed wobbles. At this point I would guess my speed to be at about 40 mph and at that speed losing control is the last thing you want to happen, so instead of just letting the fall happen and be completely out of my control I made the split second decision to jump. This sounds crazy but if I would have just let the fall happen i would have gotten it way worse… So I dove to my elbow, did a full front flip, landed on my ass and slid for maybe another 20 feet before finally stopping. Then, after i stood up, i looked back to the top of the hill to see one of my friends helping Andrew up. He just looked at me and gave me the ‘gnarly’ hand motion… The only thing I could do was bend over in pain and give him the same hand motion back while thinking, ‘yeah man, super gnarly’. THE END RESULT Andrew road rash on his left hip concussion stitches to close a head wound Me (Richard) road rash covering both elbows, both palms, both hips, part of my back fractured elbow concussion bruised pride Regarding the pictured at the top This was taken in Andrews bathroom about an hour after we both fell. What you don’t see is ten minutes from this with me completely naked in Andrews shower and his little brother scrubbing ass-fault out of me with a brill-ow pad. I was in tears and couldn’t wear anything but pajama pants for two weeks. I also didn’t find out i fractured my elbow till two days later when it was hurting bad enough to go to the hospital… Neither of us have been back to this hill since…$ Reblog ♥ Like