It is the smallest of cracks that send us careening ofttimes.

My third GoRuck Challenge, this one in Munich, was going so very well. The welcome party was welcoming to my favorite brand of fun, the weather was perfect, I was enjoying connecting with comrades new and old as well as rousing renditions of Sponge Bob Squarepants (great wrap video of the entire event).

It was good livin’ at its best. Until it wasn’t.

It was mid-afternoon and I was carrying the flag. We were simply doing a “shuffle” up a sidewalk. I noticed the water egress cover but stayed in line.

Then I was falling.

Even on the way down I thought “this is going to be bad.”

I didn’t get my hands out in time.

The brim of my hat offered little resistance to the concrete and my mouth hit hard. The bruises on my knees that only fully developed a week later say that it could have been worse. But it was bad enough.

I lay face down on the concrete for a about 10 seconds, hearing shouts and shuffles around me. I tasted blood.

I composed my game face and said into the white stone: “I’m fine. I think I lost a tooth.”

I had, indeed, chipped off about half my front tooth. My lip was busted up pretty good. After I asked for “please, only one voice,” Cadre tended to my wounds as best he could in the middle of a sidewalk. I was a bloody mess but didn’t require stitches (or so we thought).

Then he had one question: Do you want to go to the hospital?

“I want to finish.”

It was perhaps too much adrenaline. My lip had stopped bleeding, the damage to my tooth ugly but done. There was nothing, I thought, that the ER or a doc could do for me.

Right then, I had something very important to do for me.

I got myself up and, I’m not sure if it was outloud or not, said: “I’m going to finish.”

If you want the pictorial version of the story, click here through to my new sandbox site Tredecem.

Finishing

It was never a question really. It was, after all, just my face.”Merely a flesh wound.”

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