You're on your skates. Mmmm. Gliding onto an Indy-car racetrack. Ah-hah. Powering up a 350 foot mountain at heart-stopping grades. Oww. Casting yourself down the other side at speeds which pull back the flesh on your face. Yee-haw. Wincing as you hold your aerodynamic tuck through the corkscrew and hairpin turns. Ooooh. Drag racing down the flats until you're out of sight. Aaaah. Doing it all over again. Huh? Do it seven times to be exact. Uh-oh. Sounds like a recipe for road rash.

That's the scenario every spring at the Sea Otter Classic, a grueling race held on the Laguna Seca Motor Speedway in Monterey, CA. Rain or shine, the 2.7 mile loop is a highly technical mix of turns, straights, and hills. The thought alone of competing on such a demanding course is enough to strike fear into the hearts of even the most seasoned competitors. Some skating greats have taken one look at the course and gone home. Others have blown gaskets mid-race and had to pull off to the pits.

The pre-race temblor of fear that wracks the body is inevitable. So are the shaky legs which threaten to fail every time you crest the hill and take the plunge down the backside. When oxygen debt asserts itself in every lung and limb, severe instability can occur. In such a situation, a tumble of epic proportions is just around the corner.

In 1992 someone sprawled headlong onto the pavement in the corkscrew turn and shaved off a nipple. Amazingly enough, it eventually grew back. The racer rebuilt his confidence back up so that he skates the Sea Otter again -- a major victory in and of itself-- but he can still be seen T-stopping down the steepest sections of the course. Mental scars don't grow back so easily.

This year another competitor couldn't hold the turn at the bottom of the corkscrew and plowed through the dirt on the shoulder, ripping a crimson patch of flesh on his buttocks and hips. For another 45 minutes he braved the course and finished without further mishap. After the race he stoically conceded that he'll approach the downhill more conservatively next time.

Falling may be inevitable, but the consequences need not be so adverse. I've had plenty of high speed crashes, one of them into a German Shepherd who thought he'd zipper out in the road like a squirrel, but I've never even managed so much as to scrape myself up badly. The reason? I needed a half a unit to graduate from college, so I took a gymnastics class. It taught me how to tumble.

I loved flip-flops and flips most, but dive rolls are what saved my skin. at the end of class sometimes, we'd line people up face-down on the mats, then get a running start and launch ourselves clear over the pile, making sure not to clip the last person as we entered our last minute tuck into a forward roll. That forward roll prevented a sure face-plant every time. It also helped dissipate the kinetic energy of our hurtling bodies.

Similarly, if you fall on skates, by rolling to a stop you distribute the impact more evenly over your whole body. Whereas you may get a few minor nicks from rolling to rest, skidding abruptly to a stop unnecessarily abrades one primary patch of skin. That's why rolling to a stop, while appearing much more dramatic than a simple scrub, is infinitely preferable because the consequences are less dire.

The key to falling is to keep your head. By that I don't mean wear a helmet, which is a given. I mean don't lose your head by freaking out and freezing like a deer in headlights. Stay relaxed and keep your cool. That way, when making a crash landing, you'll remember those dive rolls. Stiffening up in anticipation of impact only makes things worse. Granted, it's okay for cartoon characters to skid to a stop, but we're human and don't bounce back quite so fast.


SIDEBAR

By practicing some rolling maneuvers, you're programming your body to cope with the eventuality of a fall. Once you do fall and survive it with a smile, you'll be much less apt to curtail your skating activities as a result. Mastering the art of falling is a tremendous confidence booster. Here are a few tips on falling without breaking skin:

1. When falling on skates, pretend like you've just jumped off a speeding train. Look at old movies to see how the stunt men did it. With lots of practice it's possible to roll and come up skating, but rolling to a stop is the goal of this exercise. Initiate your roll by tucking a shoulder, then rotate sideways and keep going until after you've come to a stop. By increasing your roll time, you decrease your potential for injury. When you get up and brush the dust off of yourself, you'll feel like a bandit who has just escaped with his life.

2. As you enter your roll, try thrusting your arms up over your head and roll lengthwise like a hot dog. With fewer protuberances like wrists and elbows sticking out, you run less risk of giving your bones bad bonks. An alternative to this is to draw the arms into the chest while rolling, but this leaves the face more exposed. By holding your arms up over your head you shield your ears and create a little roll-cage for your face.

3. Practice these rolls on a grassy surface first before taking your new trick out onto the street. You can start tucking and rolling on the grass without skates, and later find a place where there's a nice transition between pavement and turf so you can skate into your fall. Once you've got this down smoothly you're ready to graduate to some low speed tumbles on the hard stuff. Then with all the pads on just in case, you can bump it up to a higher speed. Please be careful since I don't make house calls.

Eddy Matzger teaches these techniques and more at his highly acclaimed weekend workshops made possible in part with product support from his generous sponsors, which include TWINCAM bearings, Roces skates, PowerBar, Breathe Right, Specialized, and Transpack. For more information on a workshop in your area, contact Bob Flynn at (813) 443-3038.