Not because I was called boring, but because I have a little story to tell and have finally caught up on my work do I decide to add to my blog today.
Thanks to two+ months of playoffs with their chicken wings, their beer, their nachos and late night pizza, thanks to a month of eating in restaurants and MSC's food court, thanks to shortness of breath from a one-block jog to catch the c-train I've decided to get back on my fitness plan. In April I set a goal to ride my bike to work 3 times a week. I accomplished that goal for 3 and a half weeks. Then it was May and I found myself with car. Now it is late June and my favourite green pants are looking a little snug, so I've re-established my 3-day-a-week-bike-to-work-rule and joined the Fitness Centre at the U of C.
It's going well so far. I biked to work in the a.m, to my 5-minute CBC gig, and home on Monday night. Felt great. So great, in fact, that on Tuesday morning at 7:15 when I got up, I decided that I needed a burst of morning exercise to get me started again. Not wanting to punish my bottom with the much less than comfortable bicycle seat my Kona is currently sporting, I opted for a walk/rollerblade combo at least as far as Sunnyside station. Twas another beautiful start to the day, with arriving an hour later than intended counteracted by the focus and lack of caffeine dependance throughout the morning.
After the day was done,
Nic picked me up for a movie. We were meeting
Michelle at
the Uptown for the 7:20 showing of
Supersize me. Due to the content/topic of the movie and the fact that I had my rollerblades in my backpack, I decided to forego the ride home and use my wheels to get back up to Dover. Putting my skates on in the back of Nic's car and skating through downtown to Princess Island Park was my big acheivement for the day. I've always been a bit afraid of the curbs, with their required hopping, and timing, and stopping for lights. But I handled them and the 7th Ave. C-train tracks like a pro last night. Before long, I was cruising down the bike path, zigging and zagging around the slow walkers, squinting my eyes against the bugs. I saw a couple on their bicycles who had been sitting near us in the theatre - we gave each other knowing smiles, silently vowing we would not be the tuquoise encased dimply rumped Big Mac Attackers we spent the last hour and half watching.
As it neared 9:30, I was through most of downtown, coming upon the zoo. I had my first skin-less moment since coming back to Canada in March. You know that part of the day where the cooling air meets the heat coming off the ground and reaches up, grabbing hold of your senses, making you feel the air underneath your skin... maybe you don't know, but it's my favourite part of the day, and it happens here only on summer evenings in the valley. I also heard the monkeys chattering across the river and began to wonder about how the orangutangs would feel about my red.... but that's another story.
Fast forward 20 minutes and I'm along the canal, running parallel with Deerfoot, passing the clubhouse at Inglewood. Having just ended a call to my mom, I put my little fido phone back in my pocket, and rollerbladed my way around the cracks in the pavement, picking my way past swarms of mosquitos in the near-dark. The end of the path was approaching. I could see the low-clearance bridge up ahead, cordonned off by the bright blue semi-barrier parks and rec safety folks put in place to keep people from having too much fun with speed.
These little blue posts are the devil. And why are they always at the bottom of hills? Someone in Parks and Rec has a sick sense of humor!
It was then I realized that I was going too fast. And the path was going down. Which made me go faster. Now stopping is certainly, for me, the hardest part of rollerblading. I have a decent sense of balance, and I'm relatively coordinated, but I'm still not very good at it. So as I lifted my right toes and pressed down on my heel-stop, I began to feel that feeling - logic erasing, anxiety inducing, sense numbing panic.
Panic. As it set in I could feel my ability to reason fade away. I began to think, in that moment before I realized all hope of keeping my balance was lost, that I could use the bright blue bars to help slow me down in time to keep from tumbling into the canal. That's when I remembered the gravel I had nearly fallen prey to on my way to work in the morning. Heel stop dragging, arms outstretched, my left skate slid out from beneath me as the wheels skidded across the finely-ground gravel on the path. Falling to my right side, feet out before me, in one last moment of lucidity, I threw my arms to the sides of my head as I slid through the gravel on my right hip. When the slide stopped I was wedged under the lowest of the bright blue bars, gravel on my elbow, dirt on my pants, purple bruises beginning from where my left thigh slammed into metal and my right thigh skidded on the ground. My cell phone, having been in my right cargo pocket, handled all of my weight and most of the impact by imprinting a fine outline of itself on my leg. It now looks like this, rendering text messaging useless.
Note the inky black spot in the upper left corner. There should be 3 lines of text above the one showing. Looks like I'll be shopping for phones this weekend.
What's a girl to do but dust herself off, look around to make sure no one saw, and skate the rest of the way home. It was my first real rollerblading wipe-out, and made me thankful to be wearing my wrist guards at least. Next time I think I'll try to remember the helmet!
