Getting just a little bit cranky...

So I broke my ankle on the first day of Nationals back in late July. Or, more precisely, I broke the fibula right at the ankle. Clean break, non-displaced. No big deal, as every medical professional I talked to assured me. No way was this going to keep me off the water for more than 6 weeks, at the most. Except that's not quite how it went down.

After five weeks of being completely non-weight bearing, the bone was showing some pretty promising healing, and I got a walking boot. Since then, the fracture has continued to heal, but it's still not done, well over 12 weeks later. Turns out, the fibula doesn't bear a lot of weight, so there's not enough compressive force to really get the bone properly motivated to fuse all the way. Meanwhile, if you do put weight on it, there's all kinds of odd micro-movement and twisting, which then apparently slows down what healing there is.

Not that it matters much, as it turns out that the high ankle sprain I gave myself in the process of breaking the bone was the more pernicious injury anyway. Those apparently take around 16 weeks or so until you can really load up the joint again, and that's if things go really well. In my case, however, there's the unfortunate bit (quite literally) where the ligament that connects the tibia and fibia at the front of the ankle, when getting sprained, managed to tear a few fragments off the bone. One of those is now sitting in the recess of the joint, right next to the ligament, aggravating things in there and keeping the inflammation fresh. That might all go away in the next three to four weeks (that's the working assumption for now), or it might need some surgery to clean things up. The 3 months I haven't sailed since that first day of Nationals is easily the longest single period without windsurfing that I've gone through in 30 years.

Meanwhile, fall in Bellingham has been remarkably mild in temparatures and pretty darn windy. The local kiters have had to pull out their 5 and 7 meter kites a few times already, and I stopped counting the number of days that would have been nicely powered slalom conditions due South, with good swell in the Bay.

To add insult to injury, with the ankle being what it is, I'm pretty limited in the amount and types of exercise with which I can distract myself. It got so bad the other day that I seriously got my low back out of whack doing way too many sets of single leg hopping on the stairs. I'm sure I'm just a real joy to live with right now, which is a cross my loved ones have been bearing with remarkable grace. My wife did, however, helpfully point out that by the time I'll be ready to get back to sailing, the water will be cold enough to have a very beneficial anti-inflammatory effect on my ankle...

USWA Nationals - Day 1

Today saw the windiest slalom racing anyone here in the Gorge can remember in a very long time. I had a real struggle getting my big (and only) 71cm wide slalom board to stay on the water, despite running a 6.2 and a 34cm fin. Bruce was racing his (probably sub-80 liter) small slalom board and a 5.4 - and was LIT. We were racing in age groups, so he ran in the Grand Masters, and I ran in the Men/Masters fleet, with the juniors and women getting their own start (the Techno 293 fleet wisely sat this one out...).

In the Grand Masters, Bruce dominated the fleet, and in the Men/Masters, James Dinnis (of Carbon Art fame) did the honors. If we get a chance to have a final rounds to determine an overall slalom winner, it will be a treat to see those two battle it out. I'll probably get a chance to watch that, too; after three heats of pretty deep finishes (5, 14, 6), struggling with the ballistic conditions on my big board, I finally got a good start with James and Chris Prior in the 4th heat. I nailed my first three jibes, and while James was out of reach, Chris seemed within striking distance as I locked in for the reach to the offset mark and the subsequent tight reach to the start pin to go into the second round.

I'm not quite sure what happened next- I only know that I went over the handlebars in what people on shore called a pretty spectacular wipeout and somehow came down with my left foot coming down hard on the sail (and, probably, beneath it the board). It felt like having twisted my ankle, and in the water, it was pretty clear that something was wrong as I couldn't even kick to swim into waterstart position, much less tolerate the pain of getting that foot up on the deck of the board to get going. Instead, I body dragged to the beach, a bunch of helpful folks got my gear and helped me out of the water, and when 30 minutes of icing failed to numb the pain at all or keep the swelling at bay, it was clear that I should get this looked at. Now it's splinted, with two fractures in the fibular - so I'll be off my left foot for at least a few weeks.

Racing continues tomorrow - since I can't do much else right now, I'll be on shore watching. Pretty bummed at this point, but then again, it's a clean bone injury that required no setting or surgery, and there doesn't seem to be serious damage to the ligaments beyond a mild sprain. And if I had to get hurt windsurfing, it couldn't have happened in a more supportive environment; not only did folks take care of all the logistics for me (thanks, Shelley, Michel, MacRae, Amy), but within five minutes of the injury I was being taken care of by an RN, a PT, and a podiatrist (thanks, Amy, Jay, and John), and then given rides to and from the ER (thanks, Ellen).

The slideshow below shows a bit of action from the 4th heat, as well as the result of me not having much else to do other than take pictures of my bum ankle afterwards... Not sure if the pictures do the conditions justice - it was furry out there. Darren told me later that gusts at the boat reached to 40; apparently, for the last heat, it picked up even more.

Epic high speed freestyle

http://www.sailrocket.com/live/?q=node/78

Sailrocket is an ambitions project to make an experimental sailboat (I cringe at the term, given that this craft bears about as much resemblance to what I generally think of as a sailboat as a Lamborghini does to a Yugo) go world record speeds. For a long time, there's been an interesting dual development on the speed circuit. 

On the one hand, you've had attempts like Yellow Pages and MI and (significantly larger and more open-ocean oriented) Hydroptere using pretty sophisticated technology and rather intricate and complex designs to balance the physics in an efficiency game - meaning they have tried to  push the boundaries of lift/drag ratios on all foils and played with ways to leverage their righting moment to produce high speeds in reasonably low wind speeds (Sailrocket just produced 52 knot peak speeds in roughly 25 knots of breeze).

On the other hand, you've had the windsurfers and, recently (and with spectacular success) kiters, play a completely different game of simplicity and brute force. Yes, the wipeouts for them have been spectacular, too, but they don't involve a 20 foot craft looping - just a good old fashioned endo or teabagging at very high speeds (and no doubt a lot of pain). Kiters have learned to harness an advantage of their platform, which is that kites generate vertical lift - that allows them to use boards so tiny, they make windsurfers' speed boards (at 45 cm or less width) look monstrous. Pair that with their tiny fins, and they could not only reduce drag, but they could also find smoother water w/o fear of things getting too shallow. Pair that with the geometry of the whole setup giving them more favorable leverage, and it's hard to see windsurfers catching up.

So far, the simple brute force approach has the edge, with Yellow Pages in 93 the only efficiency play in the long list of first windsurfers, then again windsurfers (Maynard and Albeau, really, as they were in a class by themselves), and now kiters that have held the outright record.

What's becoming obvious, though, is that there's a middle ground. The kites are taking a page from the "boats" in that they optimize low drag by employing vertical lift to reduce wetted surface (only, they do it by simply having their kites drag them up while accelerating, as opposed to using hydrofoils to get a hull out of the water). They're also employing leverage for their righting moment - only they do it by decoupling the airfoil from the sailor/craft package via long kite strings as opposed to utilizing outriggers. So they're doing the same things, but radically more simply (and thus, one might argue, more elegantly). Which allows them faster and cheaper development cycles (tuning kites is a matter of a simple recut and some tweaks to line geometry; shaping a new kite board or producing a new fin takes a matter of days and investment in the hundreds of dollars, not tens or hundreds of thousands). 

The kiters have thus managed to push the solution space boundaries by one-upping windsufers on simplicity while at the same time gaining on the efficiency front (note that they're making record runs in lower wind speeds - which means they've got a feedback loop going that gives them more chances at records).  To get another crack at the outright record, windsurfing will have to figure out how to play the efficiency game - but still retain its simplicity (or else it will be cost-prohibitive and run into the issue of slow development cycles that seems to be keeping the boats from keeping up with the kites). That means truly exotic hydrofoils and outriggers and such are probably out. Perhaps launching from a moving boat (to allow for smaller boards) might work (hey, it's what they do with speed record aircraft so they don't have to have big draggy wings); that seems to make the need for super high and consistent winds only worse, however, and will further cut down on eligible venues.  Aircraft carrier-style catapults probably add a bit too much complexity (but might produce some spectacular YouTube moments...).

Fun stuff!

Temporarily sidelined

At the end of last Sunday's session, I had the windsurfing equivalent of a lift line injury in skiing (you know those stories - skied steep and deep for hours, then caught an edge in the lift line and got hurt). After 2+ hours of sailing, I decided it was time to go back in. Sailing along, I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention, hit a piece of kelp or something, and went over the handle bars. If I'd gone faster, I probably would have gotten thrown clear of my gear; as it was, my left shoulder smacked the mast while my arm was getting wrenched back. So it's a bit of a double-whammy - not only did I get hurt, I didn't even get an epic story out of it.

The whole thing was pretty painful, so it took me a while to waterstart and sail back. By the time I'd made it to shore, my left arm was pretty useless, so I ended up having to carry my board and rig up separately. It took two guys helping me to get out of my wetsuit. Tons of ice and ibuprofen seemed to calm things down, so I figured I'd sprained something, since the xray came back normal. Over the course of a week, while the internal swelling and inflammation has gone down a fair bit, there's still some distinctive pain and loss of range of motion. So yesterday I got an MRI; this should make it pretty clear whether I'm dealing with soft tissue sprains, or whether anything is torn and will require more than just another week of rest and a few weeks of PT/rehab.

Kind of weird how off-balance you are trying to protect one of your shoulders. Working out requires some serious creativity, as does daily activity. And it's still kind of hard to explain to my 2-year-old that dad can't wrestle with him for a while. I guess I jinxed myself when the Friday before, in a conversation with someone at the gym, I mentioned how favorable the risk/reward ratio is in this sport, and how I'd not gotten anything other than one minor case of whiplash in 28 years. Should have kept my mouth shut...