Action sports and backpains

Some time ago, I was a very avid action sporter. I did it all. Diving, rock klimbing and skydiving. You name it- if it was possible to hurt yourself- I was in to it!

I have been troubled for the past weeks with a backpain. It´s an old injury I got when skydiving.

It was in mid January. We have no commersial driven skydiving here in Sweden (well maybe now there is some), we only had "clubs". Every club was also joined to the Swedish defence, and that ment that you had to do certain things for them from time to time- like posting as invading paratroops and such.

But it also ment that we could sometimes take free trips in the C120 Hercules. Even though the temperature on the ground was -30c none of us wanted to miss the opportunity to get the ride. We usually made our jumps from a Cessna 206, and it took for ever to get to bailing heights.

We made our jump, our RW (for those of you that don´t know it- the temperature at altitude are more like 0- or above).

But when you come down to about 300 meters or so the cold hits you in the face like a slap! Maybe it was that that made me take all the wrong descisions. First of all, I totaly missunderstood the winds, then shortly before the landing I did a hookturn (something you do to build up speed before the landing. I found my self going down with neckbraking speed. I flared all I could, succeded in leveling out, but only to find me travelling horisontally a couple of feet over the ground in maybe 90 km/hr. A large snowdrift was in my way! I hit it at maximum speed feet first. My mates later told me that the only visible part of me was my hands sticking out of the snowdrift still holding the risers.

When they finally digged me out I had gained countiesness. A friend of mine was working in the flight controllant tower at that time (she was also a skydiver). A collegue of her´s asked her if I was supposed to do that? And she said "Nooo... not really!"

I really did not feel any pain until the morning after. I woke up and felt a need to go to the lavaratory, but when I tride to rise up out of my bed, it was just not possible.

From time to time I´m problemed with this old injury (like I´m now)

The moral of the story is- stay with chess!