A Growing MTB Epidemic...
Concussions! Concussions! Alert!
Mountain Biking is also a "contact sport"! You say you didn't know that?
And an inherently dangerous sport where brain damage can be a serious thing! The "elephant in the living room" epidemic. Mountain biking destroys!
The growing rate of serious concussions coming out of mountain biking is not something many people know about. or wish to admit... Three articles...
...But that said, I can’t mountain bike at the moment. Near the end of last year (December 11, 2012), I sustained a concussion. I downplayed it a bit, because according to the literature and stats., I should be better soon (approximately 80 to 90 % of concussions are resolved in seven to ten days). The stats, weren’t on my side. I ended up with “post-concussion-recovery-syndrome,” a soul-sucking condition that has recovery times all over the map (typically 3 months to 1 year or longer). Ugh.
After two months of hell (think dark room, no visual or cognitive stimulation, no TV, no internet, no reading, no movies, no work, no exercise), I slowly began to crawl out of the big, dark gaping hole that I had fallen into. I am now in month six and still recovering. It has been a bumpy road with lots of setbacks, but if I look at the big picture, I am slowly getting my mental and physical health back. I could write pages and pages on how I have been navigating a healing path through my “post-concussion-recovery-syndrome”, but a recent article in The Pique, sums it up well. I can relate my recovery to a lot of the case studies covered in the article (see April 7, 2013 article, “Lives Unravelled…”) ...
http://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/whistler/lives-unravelling/Content?oid=2455087&showFullText=true (A very good, and comprehensive article)
...Nothing about that Loonie Race six years ago could have prepared Pat Johnston for the fact that it was going to change his life.
It was a Thursday night, at the bottom of Whistler Mountain, and Johnston, along with hundreds of other local mountain bikers, was climbing up the mountain in order to race back down — a familiar summertime rite of passage for Whistler mountain bikers.
"I was just going too fast and (I was) all fired up about racing," he says of that night.
On the way down, on "Crank It Up," he took a header over his bars — broken fingers, a dislocated shoulder,and, most significantly, a brain injury.
Let's not mince words, says Johnston, that's the only way to describe a concussion....
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The second part in the Concussion series:
..I believe that there is a health crisis in Whistler. I believe that the effects of concussion are far worse than what most people are willing to admit."
Helmets and concussions
Linda Glenday now knows that helmets do not prevent concussions; it took a concussion to find out.
They do, however, prevent other head injuries, as well as facial injuries.
That's why when she recovered from her six-month debilitating concussion, Glenday bought the best helmet she could find for mountain biking and the best helmet she could find for skiing...
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Mind you, mountain biking body armour doesn't protect from serious injuries, either... Food for a thought the next time your little Judy or Jack want to learn how to mountain bike inside our dangerous and unmanaged terrain on the North Shore.
And, please, nix those Mountain Biking kiddie camps because they are wholly unregulated. Read the "waiver" forms. Even "volunteer" mountain bike trail building comes with a warning waiver form (NSMBA):http://nsmba.ca/sites/default/files/NSMBA_waiver_2014.pdf
But we can't seem to legislate stupidity, people. It is your "life to unravel"... Just try not to damage so much of what is left of the Natural Capital of our Urban Forests:
It is hard to believe that only 1.5% of the population is inflicting so much of that damage to themselves and on our forests with the ongoing extreme mountain bike Freeride.
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