Over the last 3 weekends, I’ve been taking an NSL course so I can be a lifeguard. I took it at the university and the guy who taught it was the pool director there. The first two days were a lot of swimming and some first aid. It wasn’t too hard, but definitely challenging. The second weekend was all first aid and learning how the pool works with all the chemicals and the behind the scene functions at the pool. We didn’t even get in the pool. The third weekend was pretty much all swimming. We did fitness tests, scenarios and some more first aid. In the end, I thought it was easy. I knew my first aid and knew what I had to do, so I passed without a problem.
We went to moose mountain yesterday do ride some shuttle runs. We went a few weeks ealier in the year when it was warmer. When we got there, there was snow on top and the trails were really wet. I hit a couple of trees trying to avoid the big puddles that gave you a mud bath every time you went through them. It was still a really fun day though. I hit some bigger gaps that I didn’t do the last time and found out that they were easier than I thought.
Right now we’re in Silver Star BC in a condo right on the mountain. I rained pretty much all day yesterday but today it’s nice and sunny. I haven’t been able to bike yet because of my collarbone, but I should be able to pretty soon. Here are some pictures of the village on the mountain.
This is what we see when we step out of the condo.
When we walk down the path a little bit. See more of the village.
A Bit farther down the path.
This is where you can start to see the biking trails starting. You have to take a trail down to the chairlift to go up. The chairlift is lower down the mountain than the rest of the village. The one in the background is for hiking.
Here is more of the village. Quite colorful I must say.
It’s hard not being able to ride when Caleb and Dad can. I should be good to go within the next few days, but it’ll still be painful for a while. Advil up!!
Yesterday I broke my collarbone biking. You can see how in the video that I have provided in the bottom of this post. But for now you will have to read my explanation. HA! My friends and I went biking one day and he knew of this drop in the river valley near rundle park. We went and looked at it and I thought it was pretty crazy, but I didn’t do it because I had the wrong bike. A few days later I came back with the right bike and after a few (about 20) run-ins, I finally did it. I came up a little too short and bottomed out on my rear suspension, but other than that it was ok. I did it again, but this time I nailed it. Feeling accomplished, we went and rode some other stuff. Yesterday, I wanted to hit it again, so when I got there, I did some more run-ins, and realized it was pretty windy. I’ve had experience with windy jumps and although I’ve come close, I’ve never crashed because of wind up until this point. This drop was one of the biggest free falling drop that I’ve done and it was out in the open so I was exposed to a lot of wind. I timed it to where I thought it had died down a little and started to gain speed for it but right as I was about to take off, I could feel the wind pick up again. When I was in the air, I was blown a little bit to the left and landed on the side of the landing. That caused me to try and correct but I ended up turning too much and went off the trail and almost hit a tree. I was still trying to control myself in the long grass, but I hit something which caused me to go flying off and shoulder-plant into the ground. As I was laying there and trying to answer caleb’s silly questions and comments (“Oh sure, blame it on the wind…”) I realized that I couldn’t bend my knee that easily. I got up and tried moving around and realized that my right collarbone was sticking out more than usual. It hurt a bit, but I was more concerned with my knee. We pushed back up the hill and met a friend at the top and talked for a while before going home. My knee was working fine, so I started to wonder about my shoulder. It hurt quite a bit from just riding home and once we got there, my dad said it was broken and that we should go to the doctor. Long story short, we got it X-rayed and put a sling on it and now I’m just waiting for it to heal so I can go biking!
This is called a “Scrum”. Where the players bind together and the two teams engage for a rough battle for possession of the ball.
This is a called a “line out”. This happens if the ball goes out of bounds. The two teams lift one of their team members (on my team it’s me) to catch the ball. After I catch it, I pass it to a player on the ground to be moved back into play.
Here is me running with the ball about to go into contact. After I got past the first few guys I had a clear run to the goal line. But someone got in the way…
You can see that I got tackled and I dropped the ball. I didn’t even know I got hit, I thought I just dropped the ball. If you look close, you can see that the angle in which my ankle is in is not the right angle it should be. I rolled it in the game and I didn’t even realize it until that night. When adrenaline gets going, you don’t feel anything.
On January 29 and 30th we went to Castle Mountain to go skiing with some friends. It had rained the day before and the bottom of the mountain was a bit slippery, but at the top there was powder. We were used to skiing on ice at Sunridge, so skiing on powder took a little longer to get used to. After I got the hang of it, it was amazing! The second night it snowed two inches and continued to snow throughout the day, so there was a lot of powder. That was definitely the best time I’ve had skiing and I hope we go again next year.
Last friday we went to our youth group and they had a event called Jello Night. You probably guess what we did that night. We played games with jello! There was a kiddy swimming pool full of it. There was jello everywhere and everyone was covered to toe in it. My hands and feet were orange at the end of the night. They had all kinds of silly games and at the end there was a slip and slide with jello. That’s probably when I got the messiest. After that I had to get changed and cleaned up so I could play drums in the worship band. I had a lot of fun!
We went windsurfing for the first time this year. The water wasn’t that cold so we didn’t have to wear a wet suit. We got everything out and ready and started going.
The wind was blowing a different direction than what I was used to, but I ended up going pretty fast out to the other side of the lake. It’s when I turned around it got… a little freaky. I wanted to go back to get some water so I tried to go to the shore. The wind was going a different way than what I wanted it to and it was really hard. I had to zig zag back a few times and I was really tired.
When I finally did get back one of the guys that was there said, “Come on, the wind is great!”, so I ended up going out again, which was my first mistake. My second mistake was that I should have gone with a smaller sail. Caleb down-sized when he came in so I could have used his, which is smaller. The wind had picked up and I started sailing. It was great going out, but I had the same problem coming back in. Except this time I was REALLY tired. I wasn’t even half way back when I dropped the sail and had to sit down on the board to rest. I did that a few more times and had to swim the rest of the way back to the shore, where I carried the sail and board back to the shacks to put them away. Here are some pic…
