Injuries suck there’s no denying that.
Getting injured is so much more than just the initial pain. Depending on what’s happened, the initial pain and discomfort may only last a small percentage of your total recovery time.
How do you feel about not being able to do your hobbies? How do you feel about not being able to work? How do you feel if this is stopping you from becoming the professional athlete you’ve spent your whole life dreaming of becoming?
I’m about to tell you a story behind one of my biggest physical scars. It’s a pretty big one on my left knee. Some small ones on the right knee are included as part of this story I guess too.
At the time this felt like my whole world was over. At times I felt completely hopeless. But in hindsight this injury set my life on a trajectory which has landed me in the position I am in today. If I could go back in time - I would go through this all again knowing what it has taught me.
Story time…
At 19 years old I came down from a kicker 900 and landed full weight on a hyper extended front leg. I snapped my ACL, MCL and patellar tendon.
It's August, 2016 and I’ve spent the whole summer working at Airhop trampoline park in Guildford. I’ve saved up just about enough to finally pay for my flights to visit Orlando for the first time.
In September they hold the annual ‘Surf Expo’ convention where all industry leaders come together to talk shop.
My main goal of this trip was to get some face to face time with the top dogs in the Ronix organisation, and get an opportunity to ride the legendary 'Lake Ronix'.
To tell you the truth I didn’t ever think that a young boy from the UK could make it on to the Ronix international team but I had a vision of becoming a professional wakeboarder and I left school with no qualifications and no back up plan. With Liam still in school and ‘The Peacock Brothers’ still not a thing it was up to me to try to work my way up the cable wakeboarding ladder to make something work.
So I fly there, link up with some friends and manage to blag my way to paying $100 for the membership OWC used to offer pro riders. This was still a lot of money for me, but I realized that I couldn’t just hang around at the wake park without riding. So I bit the bullet and paid for my riding pass
At OWC I was pretty star struck, riding with Gunther Oka, Yonel Cohen, John Dreiling and other big names.
Whilst there I meet this crazy Hungarian guy Norbi Vasko who I had known about for some time. He used to film a lot with Nick Davies and seemed like a fun guy to shoot with.
We got on really well and decided to film a video project together - I told him of my plans to try and get to Lake Ronix and he was hyped to get to work on filming.
I get to surf expo, meet Nick Jobe (head of international sales) and Paul O’Brien (Owner of Ronix) and through my clearly visible nerves I begin to pitch why they should bring me on to the international team. I also inform them I’ve got a younger brother who once he finishes school wants to follow my pathway into wakeboarding too.
With a shock they say they’d love to have me on the team and ask if I want to go to lake Ronix to get some clips to finish the video I’d be working on.
Lake Ronix was like the 'Mecca' of the cable wakeboarding world
Still to this day, the video that Norbi shot is one of my favorites. It just reminds me of such an exciting, yet nervous period of my life - I had no guidance and was purely trying to do whatever I thought I needed to do to climb the ladder of the wakeboarding network.
Norbi - if you’re reading this, you’re a legend!! If you want to watch the video you can watch it here
We finish up the shoot and I leave Orlando feeling over the moon. This was it - my first step to my dream materializing. I was going to be recognized internationally as a pro rider for Ronix - life couldn’t get much better.
2 months after landing back in the UK and Liam and I have linked up with the boys from Mantis Pro Media to film a video project for Mystic. 
Absolute cringe again to look back at this, but if you want to watch it you can see it here
Still to this day I don’t know why we thought it was a good idea to film a project in the UK in December, but we were young and dumb and had that fire inside driving us, so we were ready to do whatever it would take.
It’s now December, it’s freezing cold and Liquid leisure has just got the first unit XL kicker in the UK. What were we thinking?
I remember doing a warm up before my ride (one of the only times I actually did a warm up before riding lol) because I knew that this session would be quite taxing on my body.
So I start out getting some warm up hits before I’m ready to get some bangers on film.
I feel like I want to get a switch nose frontside 900 done and so I gave it 2 attempts but popped the handle on both. It’s freezing in the water and I don’t want to crash again so on attempt number 3 I’m really going for it. I want a big pop, clean grab and time for the landing.
This time I have a harder cut into the kicker, big pop and on the way up I can feel this is the one! I feel the grab, get both handle passes and I’m coming down to land. Okay I’m coming down to land - wait I should have landed now but I’m still in the air
Legs have gone straight but I’m still in the air?
Holy sh*t - my front leg has just snapped in half. It feels like the inside of my knee just touched my opposite boot. I come up from the water and the first thing i can do is shout to Sam in the boat ‘my leg just snapped in half’.
I realize that I’m probably not in a good position - in freezing cold water with a crazy amount of damage done to my leg and I’m aware that there is a high chance I could go in to shock. The adrenaline is pumping so I reached forward and undo my boots. Somehow I am able to pull my feet out the bindings when my left foot comes out of the boot it feels like the bottom half of my leg is just swinging like there is no structure in my knee and it is just flailing from left to right.
Thankfully, the boat was out to come and pick me up and they brought me in to the dock. They take me into the changing room at Liquid leisure and call an ambulance.
The paramedics arrive and first things first they cut off my brand new wetsuit. I’m fuming. Puffing on gas and air like there’s no tomorrow and only a small patch of my brand new Mystic full suit covering my privates, it sets in that this is going to be a long road to recovery. My kneecap looks like it’s completely detached and is somewhere it shouldn’t be, and my leg is almost sitting at a 45 degree angle outwards.
They take me to the hospital and I get all my initial first scans done blah blah blah hospital things. And they send me home.
The next day, Liam nearly cuts himself in half trying to do a kicker kicker, but that is not my story to tell...
All I know is it was a very slow Christmas for the Peacock Brothers, both out of action and unable to get up from the sofas of my parents house.
To be completely honest during this period of time I honestly couldn’t ever see how I would be able to use my leg normally again. Every night it would be throbbing beyond belief trying to get up the stairs to go to the toilet was an impossible task. And taking the knee brace off to shower I couldn’t even put my foot on the floor without significant pain.
I think that any of you who have experienced an injury like this will know; the period of waiting between your MRI scan and receiving the results of that scan can feel like eternity.
I just need to know the results so I know what I need to do to get back onto my Wakeboard.
So I received the results of my scan. ACL & MCL are both definitely fully ruptured. She tells me that it appears there is something wrong with my patella tendon as well. I will need to wait and speak to another specialist because in all of her training, she doesn’t believe that ACL and patella tendon can both be damaged at the same time.
A week or so later I’m in the waiting room again. This time to see the next specialist Mr. Henry Bourke. He is astonished; how could it be possible that I’ve snapped both ACL and MCL - medically this is unbelievable.
Mr. Bourke tells me that he wants to use my injury and recovery for a medical study, telling me the details of a two phase recovery protocol he wants to test out.
“How long do you think I’m going to be out for” I ask him.
“Realistically we’re looking at 2 surgeries and around 24 months”. 2 years.
I'm devastated. Two whole years until I can get back to doing what I love. “If only I didn’t pop so high.” "If only I didn’t ride that day." "If only I didn’t do that stupid warm-up."
It didn’t matter how many 'if only's' were running through my head. The truth of the situation was that it was going to be a long, long recovery ahead of me.
We don't hang about with anything, as Mr Bourke wants to get started on his research paper and I go almost straight away into surgery.
That post op ward after the first surgery was very strange to tell you the truth.
Very shortly, the novelty of crutches and being bedridden wore off, and the reality that working at the trampoline park again probably isn’t an option. How will I make any money?
Thankfully, a friend from the lake offered me an office job doing 'digital marketing'. In a nutshell, I was selling coding to website publishers to increase their ad revenue. I did all the courses, and passed my Google ad publisher exams.
With a flashy new company phone and the promise of a good salary + huge performance based commission I thought that maybe this could be the start of something good.
It’s February 2017, freezing cold outside and I’m two months in to my new corporate life. Same office, same people and my manager breathing down my neck about leads and goals.
But one day I realised, I couldn't take it any more. It was during my lunch break, and I look out the window. For the first time in a few weeks, the sun broke through the clouds shone down.
In that moment, I realized that no money could ever make me continue that kind of life (I’m sorry if you do work a corporate job, I just really in my heart knew that was not for me.)
So I went from a warm office in the digital marketing company to working outside in the freezing cold with my best mate Rocco Burbidge at Liquid leisure.
Long hours and getting paid peanuts. But I had some of the best times of my life there.
The problem was I am a self proclaimed nerd and have always loved problem-solving on a computer. Deep down I wanted to be working behind the buttons on the cable. Instead always ended up with a shift at the aquapark check-in kiosk teaching the young part-timers how to use the booking system.
I was not destined for that either. I won't lie though, I worked my ass off at Liquid Leisure, and when I saw Stu Marston driving his nice Porsche around once I was healthy again I vowed to never work for somebody else as long as I live.
Around this time it's peak UK summer, my younger brother and friends like Joe Battleday, Matty Muncey and Kieran Owens are getting insanely good at wakeboarding. I've just had my second surgery and starting to use my withered muscles again.
Liam has probably the best competitive year of his life, winning multiple international competitions and surprising everybody with his victories.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit jealous. It felt embarrassing for me the older brother to have my younger brother winning and little old me just injured feeling sorry for myself.
So I decided to get to work. Working on my physical recovery but also began learning about social media, video, editing, marketing, etc..
"Maybe I can use this time to help us both move forward." Maybe my dad was right when many years ago he suggested we try and work together as ‘The Peacock Brothers’. At least then if I'm out of action, Liam could carry my name too?
I spent a lot of time between rehab sessions that summer watching YouTube videos of other people doing random things like eating McDonald’s and getting millions of views. How can they be getting so many views doing things so insignificant?
Spending the summer working at Liquid Leisure meant I got the opportunity to fly to Bali, Indonesia to help set up the new aqua park there with my best friend Rocco over the winter. We got paid literally like £5 a day, but we were young, adventurous and definitely didn't want to spend winter in the UK.
At this point I’ve had both surgeries on my knee and my recovery was going well. Thankfully, I never for a moment doubted that I would return back to wakeboarding; but the idea of not being able to ride again was scary. What was I going to do with my life?
But my leg was feeling strong and the recovery time seemed to be much quicker than we had first thought.When I went for my first ride back I was terrified. Scared if I would even still be able to get off the dock. Admittedly, I did do this far sooner than the doctors had recommended.
But it was fine. I was just gonna do laps….
Until I did my first kicker, until I did my first raley. I mean - come on…
How long can someone just ride straight laps for? It gets pretty boring fast.
There’s another part of the story which I’ve just remembered, and I will try and keep it as short as possible. Around this time, someone had been stealing my photos and pretend pretending to be me online. They had gained close to 30,000 followers on Twitter.
I can't believe I'm putting this video here, but it is quite an important part of the story.They weren’t even me. This really made me think deeply about. How could someone gather such a following pretend pretending to be someone else?
That is the true spark of the Peacock Brothers, YouTube channel. Maybe I was a bit jealous of this pretender gaining so many followers and to be honest I really like the idea of that being me.
I really wish you could have seen me trying to film the first Vlogs. It was insanely cringe. I did not have a clue what I was doing. I felt so awkward but fuck it might as well try.
It was around this time that David Caoimh had also been posting YouTube videos and I’m sad to say it, but he was receiving a lot of negative feedback within the core weight community.
David, you were the true first wakeboarding YouTuber, and I sincerely thank you for showing us that it was possible.
I met up with Liam in Thailand, where he would be competing in the plastic playground world tour. It worked perfect perfectly. I could film from the side and edit the videos whilst he focused on riding.
Man, those first days of YouTube were so much fun. We were just documenting our silly antics around the world. Wakeboarding, messing around, going out & getting drunk.
This is the video when we were first reunited and our mission to grow a YouTube channel began.This part of my life is such a blur. I can’t tell you what happened when but I am so glad to have this time of my life fully documented on our YouTube channel.
I’m not sure exactly where this story ends; I guess it's still ongoing haha!
Maybe one day I'll have to write a book. So I guess I’ll come to a conclusion now.
Without that knee injury, I never would have had the time nor the ideas to create our YouTube channel. I probably wouldn’t have had that jealousy of my younger brother winning the competitions to spur me on to become fascinated with everything I am today.
This injury taught me that my career as an athlete will only last for so long. I need to have something else prepared for when the day comes when I really cannot do this anymore.
Off the back of this injury I’ve taught myself everything I know. Photography, filming, video editing, graphic design, website production, marketing, events organizing, public speaking; the list goes on and on.
So the lesson I’ve learned from this scar. At times an injury can seem like the end. It can feel as though your life will never be the same again.
But maybe that’s not always a bad thing. It’s up to us to determine how we move forward of the back of it.
We created Scarred Societies 'Recovery Room' for anybody who is going through or recovered from a serious injury. Mentally navigating injuries alone can be incredibly tricky.
Scarred Society is here for you to know that you are not alone, and whilst you might be broken now, you too will learn some lessons by going through this.
Once you feel fighting fit again, we encourage you to come back to the group and share what you have learned, so you might be able to help someone else out who is struggling too.
Love you all,
Ryan ❤️
