The Moment of Impact
Just wanted to give a quick recap of my prior two days as I am on the cusp of heading out for a range test ride on my new One Wheel GT. The GT arrived on Tuesday as promised but it was almost a miss. I knew the board was shipped by FedEx with signature required. Because of this after getting my coffee in the morning I planned to plant my ass at home all day, I did not want to miss the delivery. I spent a good portion of the morning just sort of bumming around. Around 1:30 I decided to go out and put the mats back into the chicken coop. I may have been outside 5 or 6 minutes. After coming back in the house I wanted to walk out to the mailbox. I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw the OneWheel box sitting in my garage.
I verified with my Ring camera that the delivery was made during that 5 minute window I was outside, unreal. Thankfully since I had left the garage open the driver assumed I was home and left the GT without signature. If he didn’t I would have been driving around the neighborhood chasing him down. I decided to fire up a live stream out of the blue for the unboxing, it’s a thing some people enjoy seeing. The board looked great and thanks to the massive hyper charger I got for it, I was able to go from 32% to 100% charge in something like 50 minutes.
I ended the stream and wanted to get out for my first ride. Because of the new rounded profile tire and high PSI the board felt very twitchy, especially the first 10 minutes or so of riding. My body adjusted to the physics somewhat and I was able to ride to DD to grab some coffee. On the way back I dipped into the park to take the board around some of the pathways. I sat the camera down to get some footage of me coming up one of the paths. I was carving back and forth and suddenly had an extreme back and forth wobble on the board, I must have gotten too far onto the tire edge. I was unable to ride out the sudden movement and got launched, landing very hard on my right side. Because I had the wireless mic on me, the sound of impact was pretty intense.
I sat there for maybe a minute doing a self assessment. My right elbow and hip clearly hurt. My right hand was scraped and bruised as well. The good news is nothing felt broken so I eventually got back on the board and continued on, although I definitely cut the ride short. It shook my confidence a bit as you can imagine. You can watch the first 10 seconds of the video to catch the moment of impact.
As expected I awoke Wednesday with a lot of soreness however I already had made arrangements to go ride at the Greenway with Clay. I don’t like to bow out of commitments so I just popped a couple Advil and headed there. Clay is real chill kind of guy and is a much more experienced OneWheeler than I am. He actually has a GT on order as well so he was excited to try out the board early. We had a great time cruising down to the beach and back. I rode his board most of the time so he could enjoy the GT. After we were done we talked about future meet ups, he was not aware that Cindy and I split up so it’s a good time to hang out with more of the local One Wheelers.
Today I awoke with second day soreness which may eclipse day one. My neck is now sore, likely from trying to prevent my head from smashing the asphalt when I went down. Again, I don’t have time for pain. Advil will be the key to the 20 mile+ Dunkin Donuts ride I am doing this morning. I have a lot of GT video ideas in my head but I am trying to not cram them all in at once as it could quickly consume a lot of my remaining time off. I still have some slow down and chilling I need to do.