planetaltitude.com

[chris_planetaltitude]

Well I thought I'd start proceedings with the story of my broken back as a result of a crash I had back in the late '90s. I've basically been riding dirtbikes since i was 5 years old but had a significant break for about 7-8 years and in late '96 decided to get back into it by buying a '95 CR250. Anyone who knows these bikes probably knows they weren't exactly reknowned for their outstanding suspension. On top of that my bike had no bottom end at all. It would basically just go from nothing to band like a ton of bricks. I discovered later that the slow jet wasn't working at all because it was completely blocked. I know what your thinking - poor tradesman blames his tools etc and you'd be dead right - the fact was my confidence level was far out of proportion with my ability (probably still is!). Anyway to cut a long story short I was doing my usual laps at the local track and there was this tabletop that i was having trouble clearing. I came round the corner leading up to it and thought - "this time I'm clearing it". I gave it a gut full and the bike did its suicidal transition from nothing to band in 0 seconds right on the upramp. The result was the front of the bike went up, up, up and then up some more to the point where I landed almost vertical on the back wheel and went down arse-first in a screaming heap. I lay on the ground winded for what seemed forever scraping for even the slightest breath. Eventually i managed to draw a few laboured breaths only to discover excrutiating pain shooting down my back and in my ribs. I somehow managed to crawl off the track and proceeded to lay on the side of the track quietly wishing I would die. They talk about childbirth being painful but i tell you nothing could compare to what i was going through. Anyway my crew managed to drag me to hospital where they filled me with all kinds of "feel-good" drugs and suddenly things didn't seem so bad. The X-rays showed a broken Sacrum which is the large bone between your Tailbone and your lower vertebrae. Subsequent X-rays uncovered two more broken vertebrae further up my spine and a fractured sturnum (the bit in between your ribs) that still makes funny cracking noises when I lay on my side too long. Funnily enough the sturnum probably caused me more grief than the back - it hurt like hell for over a year and caused breathing problems. Anyway it was a long time before I got back on the bike (which incidently only suffered minor damage) and it took me ages to get over the mental grief of such major physical damage. I guess thats one of the reasons I got into designing protective gear. Anyway a picture tells a thousand words and you can check out the video of my stack on the Planet Altitude website. Just nav to the vid section. If you've got any stories, pics, videos about anything you've done whether it ended in disaster or not why not let us know about them...

[AlphaWolf]

My Friend and I went out to Nagano to go snowboarding on the slopes they used for the Olympics awhile ago, well the snow quality out there is totally different from South Korea, and we were having a blast.

The Last day was when my Friend got into an accident, to make things short he kinda got launched in the air and landed on his shoulder separating all three ligaments that connected his collar done to the end of his shoulder bone (he's still in the recovery process). I ended up with only the goggles slammed into my face, and a small split nose.

Overall besides the accident the trip to Japan was awesome, and we plan to go back one day and try it again, but I want to make sure that we have some protective gear that will protect his shoulder and I recently had a black disk and I want to ensure that I protect that also, and this looks like a good all around Products.