"Educational Narrative"

Your body is one of the most important things in your life, something you need to protect with your life or... lose your life.  Now that might seem obvious to you, but some people need to learn that the hard way, and I was one of those people.  
I have always been a very physical person willing to through my body through anything that had a less then 70% chance of hurting me.  Even a few years ago (when I was not nearly as strong as I am now) I could probably climb 60 feet in a tree faster then you could run the distance, swim faster, outlast and outplay you at soccer, then go inside and kick your butt at any video game I had, all with a "tooth pick" body and almost no food.  
One of the reasons that I could do all of this was because of my iron will power, and the desire to win at everything I did.  But the main reason that I could do all of those things is that I would push myself to keep going regardless of the consequences to my body.  I can still do all of those things, but I try to keep a more relaxed and passive attitude because I have learned the hard way that doing those kind of things can have some major consequences.
Back about 4 years ago I went to a Christian summer camp with a youth group from Hansville Washington, this summer camp was held at lake Roosevelt in East Washington almost every year and this was my first time going.  Lake Roosevelt is about 60 miles long and is one of the best lakes for inner tubing in Washington.  There were a lot of different activity's held held at the camp, some of which included volleyball, swimming, inner tubing, capture the flag, and other assorted games.  Naturally as soon as we started the first game I began to push my body beyond its natural limits, which was even more dangerous then normal because I'm extremely weak to the heat and it was about 90-100f.  As the day went by I began to get hotter and weaker, and about the time that I would have gotten heatstroke we went down to the water for swimming and inner tubing.  After about an hour of swimming the boat was ready to go and we all took turns riding behind in the inner tubes.  This went on for a couple of days, and we were all having a blast!  Our boat driver was very skilled, and would give you the choice of three different levels of difficulty on the rides.  A level one ride was a fairly slow basic ride that was all but impossible to fall off of, level two was a decent speed and often took some skill to not flip the tube.  Now you might think that a level three ride would be just one step above that, but no that was not the case.  A level three ride was more then just a step above that, at level three the driver would put all of his experience and skill to the test, staying on one of those rides was all but impossible, and there was only one guy who could do it, even though it often involved him staying completely submerged in the water for over a minute at a time.  On the second or third day that we went out I decided that I wanted to try one of the level three rides, and it was a lot of fun.  Well it was a lot of fun until I fell off and landed wrong injuring my back.  I remember as soon as my head came out of the water I let out a scream and all but stopped moving because not only was I in shock but my back hurt so bad I thought I was going to die.  As soon as they heard me scream they turned the boat around and got me out of the water as fast and safe as they could, then they headed straight for the shore.  By the time we got to shore I was no longer in shock, although my back was still in a lot of pain I was able to stand up and walk on to the shore where I spent the next couple of hours laying on a towel recovering.  After laying there for a while we did some range of motion/mobility tests and decided that I didn't need to go to the hospital (although I probably should have while it was still a fresh injury).  I remember going through what had just happened in my mind trying to figure out why I was injured when no one else was, realizing that I had hit the water before curling up into a ball causing my back to be overextended backwards.  After that I refused to ride the inner tubes anymore for the rest of the week, and the next year I was extremely cautious only going on level one rides.  That experience started me on the path to learning a lesson that I had needed to learn for a long time, it completely shattered my self confidence as well as the illusion of invincibility that every young boy seems to have.  Because of this when I got home I began to pay attention to the risks involved in doing some of the thing that I would do on a regular basis.  After a while the pain in my back began to disappear the lessons learned were forgotten and I went back to pushing myself to do a lot of dumb things.  In the process of doing all of these things without realizing it I began to make my back worse and worse instead of letting it finish healing.  This went more or less unnoticed because I would chalk it up to simply being sore from whatever I had done the day before.  After a while I started to notice that instead of being sore for a day or two then getting better my back was just getting worse and worse.  As the pain got worse I began to distance myself from doing a lot of challenges in an effort to let my back heal, but instead of healing my back continued to get worse.  After a couple months of this I told my parents about my back and they decided to take me to the chiropractor who adjusted my back bringing the pain level down to a manageable level.  Ever sense then I have been in a cycle of pain that has forced me to change to a much more laid back life style.  Not only has this changed my life style but it also caused me to begin exercising and stretching regularly in order to minimize the risks of something like that happening again.  These changes have caused me to realize just how much "living on the edge" affects your body, things like how I used to suffer from migraines almost weekly but now I almost never get them (although I still have a constant headache because of my heritage).  It has also caused me to start being the problem solver instead of the problem causer in groups.





(please remember that this IS a rough draft and I AM an inexperienced writer)