Wipeout

I nearly killed myself rollerblading on Sunday. After four and a half years of living in Brisbane, I've never once been rollerblading here. I used to wait until I was back in Singapore to go to the East Coast Parkway with Kat and do my rollerblading there. I've been rollerblading for almost 20 years because I love it. When I finally realised that I spend more time in Brisbane than in Singapore (duh), I made my dad cart my rollerblades all the way from Singapore to Brisbane for me. Since then, they've been sitting in a corner of my room behind the tv, collecting dust.

Having a Sunday to myself and having recently made the decision that I needed more physical activity on the weekends for fitness' sake, I decided to go rollerblading. Having never done this in Brisbane before, I wasn't sure what the terrain would be like but decided that the walkway along the Brisbane River would be a good place to go.

I put on my blades and left the house. I rollerbladed down Sydney Street, towards the river. It was rough, because the road was uneven, there was much debris (branches and leaves) on the ground and I had to rollerblade on the road because there was no pathway. This was all manageable until I reached a downward slope and against my better judgement, decided to try it.

For all those who are not rollerbladers, you never rollerblade on a downward slope no matter how gentle the gradient may be. A slope is a slope and is enough to accelerate you to the point where you can't control your speed. Those who I've already told this story to have asked "Can't you break?" do not understand that no, you cannot break. You cannot break because you are going too fast. The only thing you can do is slow down and then stop. But you can't slow down when you are still on a downward slope.

So here I am, hurtling down the downward slope at the end of Sydney Street when I see a junction up ahead. Because this is not a main road, there are no traffic lights. However, there was a car up at the junction which was in the same lane as I was and there was a car on the left and another car on the right.

Oh god. Three cars at a junction ahead. All have stopped and would no doubt move soon. At this point I thought, oh my god I'm going to die. I had a mental picture of if I'd kept going, I would be right in the middle of this junction with three cars and I was going to kill myself. So I decided I needed to stop.

You never want to stop when you're on a downward slope. You want to ride it out until you're on even ground again, but I had no choice. I was going too fast to do the usual stops, so I made an about turn. This was when I suppose I flew and landed on my butt, sprawled on the ground on Sydney Street. My cap flew off my head and my sunglasses flew off my face. That gave me an indicaton of how badly I must have flown.

Sprawled on the ground, I assessed the damage. My wrist guards were pretty badly scratched and I'd ripped the fabric on one of them. I checked my shorts, no holes in my shorts so that was good. Other than that, there were no cuts, no scratches, no blood. I was lucky.

In almost 20 years of rollerblading, I had only fallen once. And that was on a downward slope too, when I was 16 years old. Back then, I'd grazed my upper thigh very badly. It was weeks before the injury healed and my pants would get stained from the plasma that would seep through my wound. I still have the huge scar.

This time around, I was so lucky. Not a scratch. I was amazed. I did land on my left butt and my left sitting bone hurt a lot. This was all within the first 20 minutes of leaving the house. I wondered if I should go home and try again another day but I decided to soldier on. I took my blades off and walked the rest of the way to the walkway. After that, I had a pretty good time.

When I got home, I didn't see any bruise but when I checked again that night, there it was. The biggest bruise I had ever seen. It looks awful. It was still quite an adventure and it amuses me to think about what happened. I think it makes a great story and I will never, ever, ever rollerblade down slopes ever again.