…sometimes you better believe and trust your instincts, that day I didn’t – I pushed my limits further and my intentions in which I believe were set aside…
The result: ruptured cruciate ligament (ACL) and the awareness that I shouldn’t jump of cliffs anymore…
How that happened?
I go back a little…
Friday evening we (me, Pia and Kenny) were supposed to drive to Kuchl (Sandy’s home), to film in Gastein for the next day. Sandy checked the conditions there on friday and it was predicted that even more snow should come over night, so blue bird and pow was expected for the next day…
But heavy winds were blowing in the night and didn’t promise any good… This winter is really crazy – the danger of avalanches is at such a high-risk, spring temperatures in February, not much snow, due to the circumstance that I won’t be able to ski this season anymore, the early season finish is not tooo bad – it could be worse ;-)…
So we went to Sportgastein Saturday morning, the weather was awesome – blue sky but looking up the mountains you could see that the wind had gone through, so no pow, just a windblown snowpack… We were allowed to take up the cable car before the public, the operation manager accompanied us with his dog and warned us that we are not allowed to ski any further he allowed us to go… The avalanche commision was still on the mountain, so when we got to the top station we scouted the location and searched for some lines…
Found a cool, short face where we had to hike along the ridge, I was in front and went further… Sandy and Pia took a nice, smooth line with an easy entrance… I had to crawl up on all fours to reach the entrance to my line… Really sketchy and quite spectacular… First I wasn’t sure if I could make it through this entrance as it was just one ski-length wide (114 mm) and the cliffs made it hard to enter… But I managed it, took me a while to enter but then it was just cool 🙂
Mirja, our photographer for the day joined us and the girls wanted to do some cliff drops… We went further and the girls did some great jumps… I was motivated too but knowing that it’s not good for my knee, I stepped back and took it easy…
The next round, me and Mirja found a nice cliff where I was sure that I could handle it also… Took the 3 m cliff and had a soft landing… Went well… Pia and Sandy already inspected the next one, they did already one of them and wanted to jump of the bigger one. I had a look at it, knew that the landing would be okay but somehow I had a bad feeling… I hesitated first, Kenny was rolling and counting down, Sandy was motivating me and then I went for it. The take-off was already a bit to far back and the landing was so unhappy that I could already feel that a ligament in my knee wasn’t okay anymore… Silly me!!!! Why did I do it, Why??? But it doesn’t help know, I can’t turn back the time, it happened and know I have to take the circumstances…
Sandy and Pia kept on filming and I decided to ski down on one ski and drive to the hospital to check my knee… I didn’t think about the fact that the ACL is ruptured again, thought it wouldn’t be that bad… Still, in my mind a lot of thoughts went through, what if…
Got to the hospital, had an x-ray, a talk to the doc – same procedure as usual – I guess I’m really an expert when it comes to knee injuries…;-) The doc gave me an “all-clear”, that it’s just the side-band that got strained but I should ensure it with an MRI…
From the hospital I called the Sportsclinic in Innsbruck and Doc Gföller arranged me an MRI for Sunday afternoon…
…to be continued…
Pics from the day that I just got from Mirja…
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