As A Quick Update
Yeah, I sort of broke my wrist about two months ago.
I was riding and went to step off forward. The pedal, somehow, rotated around and I stepped on the pedal, even though my entire body was in the process of stepping off the unicycle. So--and this is almost impossible, because it's never happened to me in five years of riding--I fell off backwards.
Put my wrists down to break the fall because it's instinctive. I was wearing wrist guards, which helped, but my left wrist still hurt like hell a few days later.
Bad timing, though. We were leaving for Detroit the next week, and I was trying to finish the new version of GS, so I just didn't have time to have a cast on that was going to limit my ability to work. So I went and got one of those flexible braces at the drugstore and started wearing that around.
About three weeks ago, I went to the doctor for a sore throat, and thought I'd go ahead and get my wrist x-rayed while I was there.
I was lucky, though. I did break it, but it was a "chip fracture", meaning the bone broke, but the break didn't extend very far into the wrist (like it normally would). The doctor showed me the calcification where it was healing.
Haven't ridden since then, but it's better to the point that I'll probably start again in another couple of weeks.
Looking more closely at the wrist guards, I think I found the problem:
The hard plastic and the bend is designed to absorb the stress of impact, but I think if I had added a 1/2" layer of shock absorbing foam on top of the plastic, I probably wouldn't have broken anything. It's hard to know how much protection you need, though, until you actually fall and test what you're wearing. So I'm going to mod the glove before I ride again and hopefully that will be the end of bones breaking.
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