Halfpipe, broken knees, and sunshine

A mixed bag of awesome, frustration, pain, impatience and golden sunny rays. toss a couple free monsters energy drinks in the mix and you get my day: feeling like a bipolar person with multiple personality disorder.

I’ll start with some halfpipe. As the weather man forecast it was a beautiful, sunny, 30 minute sunburn day up on Blackcomb at the Whistler Ski Invitational. As i sit writing this my face is radiating heat, even with several layers of sunblock the rays got to me.

Now for the fun stuff; yesterday when i was shooting the qualifiers for the WSI Halfpipe comp i slipped and fell. CRACK… Uh Oh.

I’m just coming off a knee injury sustained at Mt Washington where my left knee cap decided to take the road less traveled and jumped to the side of my knee and back a couple times. My knee felt pretty good in the past couple days and i was afraid i re-injured it.

Two stops by the physiotherapist treating athletes at the Telus festival gave me some news I didn’t expect; “No Reuben, you did not re-injur your knee”

Sigh of relief? sure, but very brief before it was followed by the diagnosis: “When you fell yesterday a small piece of cartilage ripped off and is now wedged inside the joint of your knee restricting the movement”

Fan-freaking-tastic. its a four month injury if the cartilage wiggles its way out of the joint. If it doesn’t sort itself out i’ll be going under the knife some time later in the summer to get it out. (If that does happen i’m planning to ask to be able to shoot my own surgery POV style, so keep posted)

And back to the sunshine! After the main competition the riders kept hiking for a rider judged best hit contest. No need to string the hits together, just throw down as big as they could and fellow athletes picked out their favorite.

David Wise’s double.

If you are in Whistler this week and you see a big guy, blonde hair, heavy camera bag, and he is paying tribute to Terry Fox stop and say ‘Hi”. We can exchange high fives and chuckle nostalgically about my painful existence.