Downhill Run

Hello Again

Sorry, it has been a while since I updated this site. It has been a really strange time for all of us, I think. I hope you are all staying healthy and doing fun stuff. 
This time our pal the platypus is doing a downhill run. Way back "in the day" as they say I used to live for skating downhill. It scared me every time, the speed, the pavement, cars. We were crazy, but once you got some speed and settled in it was like your whole body was electric and had superpowers. You could feel the wheels, the flex in your board, see what was coming ahead, and make decisions quicker than you could blink. Time slowed down. Here is a little story of a downhill run a couple of friends and I did.

My Downhill Run

Back when urethane wheels were a new thing. My friend Brian and me skated over to our favorite hill for a speed run. On our way, we met up with our friend Mike, an older guy from school who had a car. He gave us a lift to the top of the hill. We talked over the plan in his car. Brian and I were for some reason bent on doing something like a land speed record. We would kick off from the top with all our might and then gun the hill. Mike would follow behind in his car and tell us how fast we were going.

I have to tell you at this point how crazy this was. This hill was about a quarter-mile-long residential street with a long sweeping curve in the middle and a three-way intersection at the bottom. For safety gear, we had one set of elbow pads which we use one pad each, and I was barefoot. We used to ride this hill all the time but we never really gunned the hill, we just cruised down doing stylish turns and slalom. But this day we were on a mission. 

Brian kicked off first he started fast, so I jumped on it as well. We made the first drop faster than we ever had before. We headed into the sweeping turn, all tucked up in full airfoil style. We made the turn no problem, though when you are going slower it felt like a long sweeping turn at this speed it was like a hairpin turn. At the center of the turn, there is a slightly more flat spot and a side street that went to the right and was flat (the bailout point) but we blew right by it so fast I barely saw it. Then the final drop, the steepest part of the hill. At this point, I was catching up to and pulling close to Brian. I had just gotten new wheels and my board was kind of a longboard so I was hitting the fastest point of the run. All of a sudden I see Brian started to get the dreaded speed wobbles, a little at first then really bad.

Now let me tell you a little about Brian. Brian was the most athletic person I knew. We were both athletes, swimmers, water polo, skateboarders you know teenagers, but Brian was also a diver and had just superhuman body control. You'll see why that is important to know in a minute.

OK back to the speed wobbles. Brian's board is going nuts, but Brian just slowly turns into a driveway, the board hits the little transition from the gutter to the sidewalk, the board stops dead and Brian gracefully flies toward the lawn, tucks, and rolls. Turning all his forward energy into vertical energy. He went straight up.

Now, like I said at the beginning at these speeds time seems to slow down. So I watched Brian do all this in utter amazement. As I was watching in slow motion I slowly stood up from my tuck, which made me go into instant speed wobbles. Suddenly time was back to normal and my board just flipped out from under my feet. I reached out with my front foot and as it hit the ground with the force of a bomb going off, I thought all my toes would fly off. Then I tried for a second step but my body was going way faster than my feet. I threw my hand out in front of me and started a very long slide on asphalt. It is weird how we perceive things. I remember seeing bits of my palms flying up and hitting me in the face. I ground to a halt and slowly stood up to see if I was still alive. Brian came over and we assessed the damage. 

Mike rolled up and was yelling that he had been going 45 miles an hour behind us and at the bottom, we must have been going faster than that. We all just started cracking up. We hobbled into Mike's car and he dropped us off at Brian's house. We snuck upstairs and cleaned up. Brian lent me a shirt because mine was ripped up and covered with blood. We both knew if our parents found out what we had been doing we would get all kinds of shit. Which we did, but it was all worth it.


Thanks for reading my story. If you want let me know what you think of the story.