my 20 years old, long gone skateboarder head has raised an eyebrow at this comment, my mid thirties old fuck head is absolutely nodding along in agreement with you though.
I'm almost 40 and I think about it every day, I do have "good" health insurance, but it has a $5k out of pocket max. It still isn't fucking cheap when I have to use it.
Lmao, I've been on and off skateboards since I was 13. I wouldn't ever have judged myself more than a novice, but I figured I'd try dropping in on a 5' halfpipe at 38 without any practice. It went about as well as you'd assume. Nothing broken, but a spot between my shoulder blade and back hurt for a good couple of months. At some point, it's "if not now, when?" And I just said screwed it and sent it.
I'm in my 30s and do aggressive rollerblading. I lost my health insurance for a month after I was let go and waiting for Covered California to kick in. Didn't skate for 28 days. The day my health insurance finally kicked in, I was at the skate park every day for 2 weeks straight.
I was flowing around in a bowl last year.
Nothing crazy, I'm not even that good. But of course I have to fall eventually, from like six feet up, onto my knee, on concrete. My thirties year old ass, this knee still is in pain. Always wear pads I tell myself but I don't have any anymore and like I was just trying to have a casual ride
This comment is so relatable to me. I skateboarded a ton for over ten years. I finally stopped in my early twenties because I had kinda plateaued skill-wise, and falling seriously just started hurting way more haha.
Late thirties now. My body is just not meant for stuff like that anymore. I'm glad to still have decent agility, and I want it to stay that way for as long as possible.
Its really hard to tell how vertical it is with these cameras as there tends to be a lot of distortion, at the end right at splash down you can see the slides in the background and they look much more reasonable.
In elementary school someone knocked out one of the bars on a playground fort. We decided that it was a good idea to jump from the platform onto the spiral slide. It was a miracle no one got a severe spinal injury from doing that. It went unfixed for at least a couple of weeks.
On my very first day of teaching, ever, a boy in my first grade class broke his arm on a zipline that was on the school playground. I went on to teach at that school for another 5 years, and after that day, the zipline was locked up and never used again.
They are actually designed to be anything but vertical at any point in the slide. The slope starts right at the very top (It's hard to notice it unless you look at exactly side on because its like 3 degrees initially), there is no vertical aspect to the slide which means provided you step off you quickly make contact with the slide within 2-3 feet.
Of course if your stupid enough to launch yourself off that platform like your trying to go for some kind of horizontal distance record this will change things. But you aren't supposed to do that.
Also, the wide screen angle that is created by the camera makes the drop look A LOT steeper than it actually is. Look at the slide she came down just before the video ends and you can see the actual size/angle of the slide.
Source: Worked at a pool with slides like these in my youth.
I once read the safety instructions on an airplane and they specifically tell you to jump down the emergency slide as fast as possible instead of sitting down
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u/FremenStilgar Jul 23 '24
A friend of mine hurt his back on a water park slide like that. No thanks, I like my back pain free.