Sorry to use this tragedy for an opportunistic but related comment.
If you have had past struggles with suicidal thoughts, or depression combined with addiction, then you should not own a gun. You might feel fine today, but relapses happen.
Other ways to attempt suicide are less fatal and more complex, giving you more chances to back out.
I'm not sure if my thoughts on this subject can ever be articulated correctly, but I'm going to try anyway at the risk of being misunderstood.
Due to my lifelong struggles with addiction, I have often contemplated suicide. Actually, one of my closest ex-girlfriends off-handily remarked 20 years ago that she thought suicide might be the only answer for me, after doing everything in her power to help me over a 3 year period.
You see, she intimately saw the pain that my self-inflicted junkie lifestyle dispensed to others and, on a much deeper level, myself.
Today, I continue to live in the wreckage that I so carelessly created, with a brother whom will not talk to me no matter what I do and old friends whom don't return calls, and I'll be honest...life is pretty bleak when family and friends no longer exist.
Why is it that some, often ancient, cultures not-only-tolerate but almost-glorify suicide when an individual has lost their self respect or has been publicly shamed?
Maybe suicide isn't the worst possible option there is.
I remember earlier very open minded posts from you. Thank you.
I can relate a bit about the loss of family and friends and feeling desolated. While it is true you might not be able to replace your family, it is possible to make new friends.
It worked for me and I have never been happier, even without the family.
Your ex was wrong.
Ancient societies, frequently full of wisdom, also believed dumb stuff like the sun orbiting the earth and that bathing regularly was bad for one's health. Please reach out to me and I'll gladly give you my phone number.
>On the brink of a trick, McCoy explains, “there’s a sense of calm and shit sort of quiets down and it’s time to focus.”
I used to do bike trails[1] and also rode every stunt on every double black trail on the North Shore in Vancouver. [2]
I know the feeling being described here, and I'd venture it is the _real_ reason people engage in these sports.
There is a calm when pulling off a really risky stunt, like gapping handrails or riding along a skinny elevated log, and it can be addictive.
>“I’m more comfortable on my bike, jumping, than I am walking down the street,” says Ryan Nyquist, 37, who still competes.
After doing trials for years, I would often say to people that I'd feel more comfortable riding my bike off a big dropoff rather than jumping down to land on my feet.
I can personally attest, that that feeling is hard to give up. I had to stop riding trials at around 37 because of damage to my spine, which thankfully remained limited.
Many of my cycling friends report missing it as well.
(I am not either of the riders depicted the linked videos, just included them for context. Also I never came close to riding at Ryan Leech's level, who is also a very nice guy.)
I used to skate a lot when I was younger too. That feeling never really goes away once it's been trained and recognized. It just kind of fixates on another thing.
Not being able to get into that flow is a dangerous thing because you'll always be searching.
As an avid BMX rider during the mid 90's to early 2000's, Mirra was one of only a few greats, along with Lavin and Nyquist, I looked up to. This saddens me greatly, but also helps me understand a lot of my own inner turmoil growing out of my own x-games centric life. From aggressive inline skating everyday in Texas, hitting jumps in the woods of Nor-Cal on my BMX, to bombing the streets of San Francisco on a skateboard, I now better understand the feeling of thrill separation as an older, risk-averse, adult; thanks to some of the insights in this article.
Mirra had recently been feeling lonely and lost, his friends tell me, but it never occurred to them, or most of them, to worry for his life.
Someone very close to me committed suicide and this is exactly how I felt. I resolved to never look past this symptom again and try and be more active in how I respond in the future, if I ever see it again.
At the time, I remember feeling helpless and unsure how to help. If I could do it over again, I'd just be there and offer to listen more than I did. I'm not saying this would have made the difference, but it's what I would do in the future.
While I agree that people should get on their bikes more, this is not mere "cycle sport". I bought a BMX bike at about 35, after a decade or more of "only" riding mountain bikes, mostly on streets and well-maintained trails but occasionally going off-road. Within a week of getting back into doing the old freestyle tricks I used to do regularly, I took a fall and damned near broke my ass; and we're definitely not talking about tricks on the scale or level of someone like Mirra, here. It was weeks before I could sit comfortably again. I had to work lying down or standing for at least two weeks.
The type and magnitude of injury one can sustain from BMX freestyle riding, particularly vert riding, is just not in the same category as the kinds of injury you'd sustain cycling in the traditional sense (short of getting hit by a car, which is also probably more likely for freestyle riders).
So, yes, get on your bike (or kayak, or running shoes, or whatever) and get daily exercise. That's a great idea. But, "extreme" sports are called that for a reason, and they do subject your body to much more significant risk of injury, possibly even serious injury. There is already good science linking repeated concussions to depression and other mental illness; and it's not crazy to suggest these folks are getting more concussions than the general populace (when I was involved in these kinds of sports, I had friends who joked about how many concussions they'd had while skating or biking).
I'm agreeing with everybody in this thread, I think, but the notion that "doing sports" is what Mirra was doing is sort of like saying a hurricane is "some wind", and that it's a healthy lifestyle is misleading. He was fit, obviously, but had also suffered numerous major injuries throughout his life, many of which likely still caused him pain and reduced mobility, even years after they'd healed. Concussions were almost certainly among the injuries he sustained.
Completely agree with you. I used to wakeboard a lot and tore my ACL coming out of an invert. After 9 months of physical therapy I went back to wakeboarding, but not long after decided it simply was not worth it. Falls really hurt, and bad ones can take months to recover from while stopping me from enjoying every other sporting thing I liked to do.
If I'm not getting paid to do something, at some point the life impact risk is not worth it.
This is not relevant to the parent comment. Being active, or even playing most sports, can be mutually exclusive with putting yourself at risk for CTE.
This is a poor general rule. Sports can have hugely different profiles of health effects: running is almost certainly better for you than boxing or football. In any case, brain damage is bad and you should avoid it if at all possible.
I don't think it is so poor if you consider the benefits of cycling outweigh the risks. Most sports aren't done in traffic, so I imagine that cycling is relatively high risk.
While there may be a baseline level of risk for falling and hitting your head as an accidental occurrence in most sports, it's not much higher than in other areas of everyday life. But some sports (football, boxing and some other combat sports, and vert-ramp extreme sports of all varieties, among others) all put participants at much higher risk for repeated head traumas, which has in recent years been shown to cause long term, degenerative physical and psychological effects. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopat...
People are more than free to choose which sports are worth their inherent risk. The problem is that that risk isn't actually well understood scientifically, and generally people are totally ignorant of what little information is known.
Sports may be worth the risk (I think they are), but that doesn't mean we should give up on discovering what the risk is.
What about the reward? Yeah, this is a seemingly unfortunate conclusion to his life, but we should persue all avenues to discover why, not only the aspects that we assume were negative influences...
You could fall and hit your head doing no sports at all. There is a spectrum where flying the wingsuit, BMX, downhill skiing, ski jumping, and snowboarding, American football are on one end; beach volleyball and synchronized swimming on another.
>How much "brain damage" is caused by the psychological and physiological effects of a sedentary life-style?
According to your uninformed comment, perhaps some?
CTE is not a joke, and isn't the product of a few head bumps. The fact that you put brain damage in quotes, as if the brain isn't actually damaged from such things, is beyond ignorant.
The quotes were intended to differentiate between the obvious, instantaneous brain damage from head trauma and the long-term, hard to measure effects of an unhealthy, sedentary life-style has on the brain.
I was trying to point out that we are overly focused on the easily measured (negative) effects. His life-style also had positive effects, but they were not instantaneous.
Knowing what led him to suicide is infinitely more complex that asking "how many times did he bonk his head?".
No threat of falling, perhaps, but open-water swimming (for example) isn't risk-free. My mother has hit by a boat during an open-water race, and was very lucky to avoid a spinal fracture.
That was a really great read into some of Dave's life at the end. Growing up and riding, him and the other vert guys were always the nice guys and role model types of bmx. They were in stark contrast to what we all watched and did riding street. Dave introduced a lot of people into this sport and advanced it in many ways beyond new tricks.
i wonder if the alcohol played an issue in his decision to kill himself. I know that people with some mental instability can be rapidly triggered by its effects. I've seen it and felt it.
Perhaps people in the US know of good quality initiatives? (Certainly the "Zero suicide" stuff from Detroit has been useful for me when I'm trying to change people's attitudes that death by suicide is somehow inevitable for some populations.)
> Another says it didn’t happen exactly that way. But whatever went down, by the time the friend arrived at the truck, parked just outside, Mirra was already dead, a suicide, the police established, with no room to hope it was a mistake. When Mayor Thomas arrived at the scene, the front door of the truck was open and family members were beginning to arrive. Mirra’s friends and the cops all stood around, “staring at the rain, like, What in the world has happened?”
> In the tiny, tight-knit clan of 40-something BMXers, many could not believe that Mirra intended to commit suicide.
Some people wonder why the US's suicide rate is lower than the UK. This paragraph snippet hints at some of the difficulties in counting deaths by suicide.
If I shoot my self is that a death by suicide? Or an accidental death? If I overdose on opiate pain meds was that a deliberate choice, or an accident caused by confusion?
You can't leave it to coroners - there's too much variability (some didn't want to rule a death as suicide because they thought the family would find that too distressing) and because death by suicide has to be proved beyond all reasonable doubt while most other deaths can use the balance of probability.
> Statistics on causes of death produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) are based on the information provided at death registration. These statistics are provided to the Department of Health on an annual basis. Open verdicts are generally coded by the ONS as deaths from injury or poisoning of undetermined intent. When national statistics are presented, suicides and deaths of undetermined intent are combined. This reflects research studies which show that the majority of open verdicts are most likely suicides, although they do not meet the high legal standard of evidence required for a coroner to record a suicide verdict. Therefore official suicide rates are measured by a definition that is broader than the definition of suicide used by coroners.
> In the remainder of this update we use the term suicide to refer to deaths from both intentional self-harm and injury or poisoning of undetermined intent.
>Death caused by self-directed injurious behavior with an intent to die as a result of the behavior.
If the US used the UK definition suicide would be the leading cause of death for men aged between about 11 to about 49. Suicide is still common in people over 50, but other causes of death (heart disease, cancer) start taking over.
If you have had past struggles with suicidal thoughts, or depression combined with addiction, then you should not own a gun. You might feel fine today, but relapses happen.
Other ways to attempt suicide are less fatal and more complex, giving you more chances to back out.
Harvard on the, powerful link between gun ownership and suicide: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/