Skateboarding Careers Don't Start at 30

Jarret's Entry:
This weekend we had the season kick-off party for the Lavon Chapter of Wakeboard Church. We had a great time of fellowship cooking out burgers, doing wakeboarding tricks on the trampoline, praying together, and trying out the new winch! The last activity though I should have just been a viewing instead of participating member. For those of you who have never heard of a winch it is basically a portable structure that has a small engine that powers a spool so that wakeboarding can be done in ponds, creeks, and other places where you can not take a boat. It is really opening up a new level of wakeboarding by allowing people to participate in an otherwise expensive sport by removing the most expensive element...the boat.

So our Lavon crew has built their own and I got to try it (off the water) for the first time on Saturday. The way it works is that you pull out the rope you have wound up on the spool, fire up the engine, and then the spool spins pulling you back in towards the winch. You can often have 1,000 feet of rope making for a decently long ride. Well, after seeing a few others try this thing out in the street on a skateboard I decide to give it a go. I already had a sore and bruised up hip and elbow from getting banana peeled on the skateboard just messing around few minutes earlier. Because of this, myself and others thought I would have a better chance being pulled on the skateboard if I just sat down on it. "Sure," I say thinking that sitting down is a much safer alternative to standing up since I obviously don't know jack about how to skateboard. So I plan to sit on the back of the skateboard and put my feet up on the front of the board.

So here we go. I give the thumbs up and they fire up the winch. Keep in mind that this thing has no speed control. It has a throttle that you can adjust but the speed is very unpredictable. Well, shortly after starting it up I begin to be pulled very fast. I quickly realized that sitting on the skateboard was going to be very unstable. Hoping to cut my losses, I let go of the rope and took my feet off to the sides of the board to slow down. This proved to be a very bad idea since now all my weight was on the back of the board. Before I could do anything the skate slipped out from under me and I was doing at least 10mph down the concrete road on my back! You have no idea how bad this hurt! I tried to play it cool in front of everybody, but I thought I might pass out because the pain was so severe!!!

Anyway, I guess you live and you learn. My skateboarding career started and stopped in the matter of a few minutes. Those things are from the devil and I think I will try to avoid them for the remaining days of this life!

-Jarret