Unbroken: The Snowboard Life of Mark McMorris Page #6

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but also support you

when the journey's

not going well.

It wasn't athlete Mark,

"I'm the finely-tuned machine,

"ready to go out and destroy

a slopestyle course."

It was just a person,

who was overcoming

an incredible injury and

dealing with a lot of pain

and disability

throughout his body.

Pretty crazy what

he even asked me.

He was like, "Do you even

wanna do this anymore?

Don't feel any sort of

pressure from us or anything.

We're here to support

whatever decision you make."

Pretty cool to know.

It's not just a

business relationship.

It's way more than that.

I knew how competitive the

Canadian slopestyle team,

just getting on that team

for the Olympics, was.

And I knew how focused

he was on that.

You could feel in his soul

that he was just focused on

getting better and getting

back to what he wanted to do.

Okay, here we go, get

into the recovery mode.

Every morning I wake up,

it's the worst thing ever.

It's just like the whole

side all the way down.

It's hard to breathe

a lot of the time.

When I talk, I just have

to stop and regain myself.

Yep.

There's a concern, there's

a fundamental concern.

I've known Mark

for a lot of years,

and when I looked at

the list of injuries,

he was discharged extremely

early from the hospital.

It's tough for you because

sitting hurts, standing hurts,

walking hurts, lying hurts.

Yeah, I just hurt,

so much stuff that

there's no safe place.

Yeah.

Wasn't his first

significant injury.

We've been through

the fractured femur.

We've been through a broken rib.

So, it's like, okay,

let's understand

the extent of what

the injuries are.

Yeah, you don't

have great blood flow.

I think it was his dad that

told me the first thing

that he came out was

kind of, "I'm okay."

And the second thing

that came from him,

"Does Damo think I

can do the Olympics?"

Which is pretty

powerful in terms of

where his mindset

was at immediately.

Oof.

This hurts so bad.

(groaning painfully)

I don't think I'm convincing

myself that everything's fine,

but I qualified for the

Olympic team already,

and know I had a

chance to go there.

[Damien] You ready, bud?

[Mark] Yep.

Okay.

[Damien] Just easy.

Little squat, but

the key thing is

I don't want you

holding your breath.

So just little movement

through the hips.

Breathe out as you move down.

Don't hold your breath,

even if it's cold.

The process of getting back

is, you're gonna get sore.

You're gonna have to go

through the same thing,

and get sore again, spend

a lot of time in the pool,

a lot of time working on my arm,

a lot of time just trying

to stabilize my core area

and my torso, which

took such a beating.

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