Broken Momentum: A Snowboarding Injury

The crash itself happened fast.

One second I was following a friend into a side hit off the trail. The next, I was sitting in the snow realizing something was seriously wrong with my ankle.

The run had started normally enough. A few of us had linked up that morning and spent the early part of the day taking laps together. Conditions weren’t great — crunchy snow in places, uneven underneath — but nothing that felt unusual.

I followed Ollie toward a side hit beside the run and decided to carry a little more speed into it.

The landing immediately felt unstable.

I tried landing on my toe-side edge, but instead of locking in cleanly, I started sliding downhill. After a second, I managed to catch my edge just enough to stop myself. I stood upright for a brief moment thinking I’d saved it.

Then my weight shifted again.

I started falling a second time and got thrown into a tumble. Somewhere during it, the tail of my board planted vertically into the snow while my momentum kept carrying my body downhill.

All of that force went straight into my right ankle.

I knew immediately something was wrong.

The pain was intense enough that I stopped thinking about the fall itself and started thinking about how I was going to get down the mountain.

I sat there for a minute trying to process it while the others stopped nearby.

At first, I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to ride down.

Eventually I got moving again, mostly heel-sliding because transitioning edge-to-edge hurt too much. Every turn sent pain back through my ankle, so getting down became less about snowboarding and more about managing it section by section.

I looked into getting help from ski patrol, but they could only take me down in a rescue sled. At the time, I didn’t think I was injured badly enough for that, so I kept riding instead.

Probably stubbornness more than anything else.

By the time I made it off the mountain, the adrenaline had mostly worn off and reality started settling in. I wrapped the ankle, grabbed painkillers, and drove out toward Bendigo campground near Cromwell knowing the next few days were probably going to look different.

The first night was mostly spent lying in the van with my foot propped up, trying to sleep, and hoping things would calm down by morning. More than anything, I was frustrated.

Not just because of the injury itself, but because I knew I was missing time on the mountain with friends.

That part was harder than I expected.

The following days slowed everything down completely. I drove back toward Mt Aspiring National Park and camped near the river while trying to rest properly. Most of the time was spent sitting beside the fire, reading, sleeping, or doing nothing in particular while waiting for the pain to settle enough to walk comfortably again.

That’s when the reality of it started setting in.

Not having service out there changed the feeling of it completely. There wasn’t a constant stream of updates showing what everyone else was doing. No photos. No videos. No reminders every five minutes that plans had changed.

In a weird way, that probably helped.

It gave me enough space to stop thinking about what I was missing and start thinking more realistically about recovery, rehab, and how quickly travel plans can shift when your body suddenly stops cooperating.

Travel online usually gets reduced down to the highlights — good weather, good conditions, movement, momentum. But a lot of the experience is adjusting when things stop going perfectly.

Injuries. Delays. Bad timing. Uncertainty.

That’s part of it too.

Nothing dramatic happened during those days camped by the river.

That’s kind of the point.

Everything just got quieter.

Looking back now, the bigger adjustment wasn’t physical.

It was mental.

Going from constantly moving to suddenly sitting still forces you to confront how attached you get to momentum while traveling. You start realizing how much of your routine becomes built around chasing the next experience.

The injury interrupted that completely.

But it also forced me to slow down long enough to actually sit with where I was instead of immediately moving onto whatever came next.