Broken
"Ive only ever broken bones a handful of times in my life, all were from parkour, now, when I say this I don’t mean that parkour and freerunnning are terribly dangerous sports, because in all reality they aren’t. They’re more of self building sports than anything. Our sport of parkour is a lot different than other sports. Gymnastics is all about “perfect” form, baseball is all about accuracy, all these sports focus primarily on externally noticeable progress for the main purpose of “being on top of the game.” But parkour and freerunning are different, there is more of a style development than anything. This of course isn’t saying that there isn’t any skill that goes into it, because if you’re gonna be pulling off dub fulls and dub sides and 360 carts you’re definitely gonna need the air awareness of a mad lad lol. But that isn’t the only focus. When you hear most freerunners talk about parkour and freerunning they mainly talk about how its an outlet to get out stress, anxiety, fears, etc. For the most part ego isn’t a big factor in our sport. But about 6 months ago I kinda forgot that.
I was going through a really good and progressive stage of training it seemed like. I was able to pull shosei dubs off pretty much anything, my low casts were getting really good, my lines were getting better, it was overall just a really good time. And through it all I was getting pretty confident, not only with my movement but also with myself. And I’ve always seen my development of self with parkour as me having something to prove to myself, so having that confidence made me feel like I needed to do harder stuff, because if I’m not proving myself to me then I’ve pretty much lost all self development.
So I started doing tricks that I had little to no confidence with like kong gainers, roll bombs, and dub sides. And I know a lot of you have probably seen me do dub sides on my insta a lot and you’d imagine I’m pretty comfy with the move, and to be honest when I think about the move I feel like I can do it pretty easily. But when it comes time to actually do it I’m terrified.
February 7th 2019 rolls around, and by now I had messed up my big toe insanely hard on a kong gainer, and I had gotten probably the worst heel bruise I’ve ever gotten from a dub-a, so bad to the point where I couldn’t put any weight on it. And they were on different feet, so on the foot that I had bruised my heel, I had to basically jump and land only on my toes which wasn’t unmanageable. But on the other foot, I could pretty much only use the outside of my foot. So imagine the experience right before you roll your ankle and you know that the path your ankle is heading isn’t good, so on every single jump and on every single take off… It was spooky lol. And after all this, I made the unwise decision to continue training immediately, and I made the very unwise decision to continue training at pretty much the same capacity as I was before.
I was still hitting dub fulls onto concrete, doing lines, and just doing everything I used to do, except I would just play a gambling game during it all with my ankles. And on this day I decided that I wanted to get roll bombs outside. So Fernan (@fernan_flips) and I drove to the spot and I was prepping it for probably about 20 minutes and it seemed super doable, so I did it, and I could’ve landed it on the first try but I just opened up too early, and on the second try I stuck it. I was hyped over that, and I really wanted to get a line with it because lines are pretty much what I’m known for. And I was standing on this electrical box that I was sending the roll bombs off of, and in the back of my mind I was just like “I really wanna dub side this” and for the 30-45 minutes we were there I was resisting that voice in my head because I was scared.
So I’m prepping for this line and going through it to feel everything out. And once I get on top of this box the voice gets louder and more compelling, so I just turn to Fernan who’s down on the ground training, and I say “Fernan start recording.” So at this point, I had basically zero prep for this dub side off of like 6-7 feet, Fernan didn’t know what I was about to go for, and I just had a mixture of fear and excitement running through me. And it goes without saying that not prepping the dub by just doing some singles off the box was a terrible mistake because when I actually went for the dub I had absolutely no clue on how much airtime I would have. So I ripped the dub blindly, and made it around easily, but the problem was that I made it around a lil too easily. So when I actually landed I had let go of my tuck SUPER late and I landed in essentially a deep squat. I of course wasn’t in a perfect squat position though, because I just did dub side lol, so my chest was forward and I was on my toes. And the amount of impact from landing from a 7 foot drop in a deep squat with my chest forward focused pretty much all the impact onto my front foot (my left foot.) And ankles just aren’t made to handle that kind of stress lol. But at the time I didn’t really think much of it because I was so filled with adrenaline that it didn’t really hurt too bad.
“This is how I landed the dub, my left ankle took all the impact and didn’t even absorb anything with muscle, it was literally all on my ankle.”
The worst of it was after about 10 minutes, and I was trying to walk because we had to get back to the car, and It was awful. I can’t say that I fully couldn’t walk, because I was walking, it was just probably the worst ankle pain I’ve ever felt with each step. And like I was saying before, I take a lot of struggles as a way to test my capabilities. So I refused any help from Fernan and just kept walking, but I now have learned that doing that was about the worst Idea I could have had because when I finally went to see my doctor the day after, he said that walking to the type of break I had (Medial Malleosus break) I could have allocated the bone fragment away from the bone to the point where I would have needed surgery, which would have caused a longer recovery time.
Time with the cast went by very slowly. I didn’t really do much so days felt long. I'm super thankful that I had my amazing girlfriend to talk to the whole way through the recovery though, so she helped me literally so much. The recovery time would have been excruciating without her so thank you baby.
The want/need for training really hit me hard. And its not really that I wasn’t training, because I was, but it was only on one foot of course. And Ive always been the type where, if I don’t do hard moves and stuff then I don’t really feel accomplished with a sesh. So not being able to get that sense of pride from training kinda messed my mental state up, along with physical aspects, since I wasn’t training as hard I was getting out of physical shape which I felt terrible about. But now being back into more hardcore training, everything has improved 10 fold. I guess the only take away I can have from this whole experience (which is something I know probably a lot of people will need to learn) is to not let ego, pride, or just the want to be put into a “cooler” social aspect in other peoples minds, make you do dumb things. This isn’t saying that I shouldn’t have pushed myself. But there's no doubt that I could’ve been smarter with it."
