oops

From comments..."Anyway - Sounds like you're pretty good natured about the whole thing so. :-) Keep at it and you'll probably get pretty good eventually. Of course that is assuming that you don't break something before then of course. ;-)"

Too late.

The first one to go was a rib high on the left side.

The better I get, the faster I'm going when I eat it. We were at Keystone, and I was trying to keep up with a friend who may or may not have been born with a snowboard strapped to his feet. I was bombing down the mountain at around mach 3, when I caught my front edge on a pretty steep blue slope.

According to eyewitness accounts, I was in the air for over a full second, long enough that I remember thinking "This is going to be reeeeally bad", before I slammed to the earth with my left fist caught between my chest cavity and the hard hard surface of inevitability.

Then I started to cartwheel.

Then I continued to cartwheel.

I've never been especially good at cartwheels, but these were superb, true cartwheels. Body fully extended, head... board... head... board... etc.

Once the cartwheel show ended, I ended up facing up the mountain, still travelling at a brisk pace. I dug both elbows into the snow, and after leaving two 50 foot furrows in the snow, finally stopped.

Everyone who wasn't dialing 911 hauled ass to my position, ready to begin first aid.

Pride pushed me to my feet, and I continued to board the rest of the day.

I've been out twice since then, and was doing ok with it until I replayed the exact scene at wolf creek last weekend.

Breaking a rib doesn't hurt nearly as much as landing on a broken rib.

I literally couldn't breathe for about 5 minutes, and thought i might have punctured a lung, but apparently not.

Oh well...
I have two more days to heal before my next trip to keystone. I doubt that it will be enough, but hey, if Soldiers can be hard when it comes to accomplishing missions, we should surely be tough enough to drive on when we're doing things we WANT to do, right?