Spinal cord Armageddon!

First off, I am gutted to hear about Stan and hate to see any rider or anyone face this kind of injury.

Put it out there that the modern style of riding (speed and flow) has affected injury rates.

Go back a few decades, the learning speed was a lot slower. You still crashed, but with a less speed, and therefore less energy. By learning to crash and how to control your body, you learned to protect yourself better. There was still heavy exposure, but crashes tended to happen slower, providing a bit more time to react and protect the parts that matter.

Skip forward, beginner riders are heading down pump-track trails at speeds us old geezers only dreamed of. Technology has assisted this HUGELY. Better bikes with better suspension, better angles, better everything allow us to ride much faster much sooner than ever before. The awesomeness of modern bikes allow even mediocre riders to push their experience to edges that we seldom messed with when we were stuck with vee-brakes, bumper forks, and 68 degree head angles. By having these bikes that go faster, we can explore limits formerly reserved for the elite, and hit speeds that would have seemed obscene back in the days of North Shore Extreme Vol 1.

When ^&*@ goes wrong, it goes wrong fast, and if it's one of your first big crashes, the chance of catastrophe rises. No saying at all that this applies to the person in the article, but I am pointing it at the overall increase in general.

This also isn't ranting that old-school riders are somehow better, but noting that the learning curve today is entirely different than what it was when I started.

I also absolutely believe the tendency to fast flow trails had caused an increase in concussions....more speed = more energy, and that is energy transferred to the brain when it hits the inside of your skull. Helmets barely mitigate that damage.

I ride with my kid, and I am grateful to have a cautious kid who is in it for the climbs. We do a lot of walk arounds.

Gymnastics. They can really help people to learn to fall properly. Good classes for kids that ride.

Posted by: Jotegir

Ooooh! I remember back in like 2013 Blue Mountain Bike Park in Ontario (RIP) had a mandatory skills test to ride their 'advanced' jump trail Haole, and later their larger jump trail H-twenty, once that was built. When you bought your ticket you had to tell the person at the wicket that you wanted to do the skills test, take the chair to the top, and then hope there was an employee at the skills zone to administer the test. It was like, a one foot tall table top and a skinny. Once you passed, you got a sticker on your pass. They kept an employee at the trail entrance who was supposed to be checking stickers and controlling access (the bike police!). The trail was pretty tame by modern standards but that's Ontario for you I guess. I suppose it worked because the only people to (famously) die at Blue Mountain in recent memory didn't die on either of the jump trails.

So there is a precedent. Maybe that model should be presented to (or mandated of) the bike park operators in BC.

Again story was in the news cycle tonight on CBC. 21 spinal cord injuries in mtn biking as opposed to 3 while skiing in same time period.

That's seven times higher than skiing.

Research shows high number of people with spinal cord injuries from high-risk sports - YouTube

ffs Endurimil, I'm hardly privy to you're personal history.

Really good article out today by the Vancouver Sun on the topic. 

https://vancouversun.com/feature/bc-spinal-surgeon-warns-of-rise-in-mountain-biking-injuries

It kind of tracks... there are literal CROWDS of people cleaning Dirt Merchant on a random Thursday at Whistler these days. A friend and I made the trip this fall and after riding every black and double black tech trail in fitz, we just did lap after lap of DM til close.  I had a moment of reflection a couple days later thinking about just how big some of those jumps are. There's one particularly huge jump that isn't really memorable near the top, it's sort of between some of the more famous step-uppy ones. A couple car lengths? That's a SLAM if messed up. What's the risk equivalent of that at the ski hill? I can't even really come up with a proper equivalent. Maybe cliff hucks? But even then, not too many people are really going big and they're mostly doing so on days with a modicum of powder induced safety rather than the dirt-crete of flow trails.  Not like the crowds on the huge trails every single day, all summer long. Our sport has progressed to the point that there are just so many people going huge in volumes that were unfathomable a couple years ago.

Posted by: cerealkilla_

First off, I am gutted to hear about Stan and hate to see any rider or anyone face this kind of injury.

Put it out there that the modern style of riding (speed and flow) has affected injury rates.

Go back a few decades, the learning speed was a lot slower. You still crashed, but with a less speed, and therefore less energy. By learning to crash and how to control your body, you learned to protect yourself better. There was still heavy exposure, but crashes tended to happen slower, providing a bit more time to react and protect the parts that matter.

Skip forward, beginner riders are heading down pump-track trails at speeds us old geezers only dreamed of. Technology has assisted this HUGELY. Better bikes with better suspension, better angles, better everything allow us to ride much faster much sooner than ever before. The awesomeness of modern bikes allow even mediocre riders to push their experience to edges that we seldom messed with when we were stuck with vee-brakes, bumper forks, and 68 degree head angles. By having these bikes that go faster, we can explore limits formerly reserved for the elite, and hit speeds that would have seemed obscene back in the days of North Shore Extreme Vol 1.

When ^&*@ goes wrong, it goes wrong fast, and if it's one of your first big crashes, the chance of catastrophe rises. No saying at all that this applies to the person in the article, but I am pointing it at the overall increase in general.

This also isn't ranting that old-school riders are somehow better, but noting that the learning curve today is entirely different than what it was when I started.

I also absolutely believe the tendency to fast flow trails had caused an increase in concussions....more speed = more energy, and that is energy transferred to the brain when it hits the inside of your skull. Helmets barely mitigate that damage.

I ride with my kid, and I am grateful to have a cautious kid who is in it for the climbs. We do a lot of walk arounds.

Gymnastics. They can really help people to learn to fall properly. Good classes for kids that ride.

I agree with everything you say, the trend of creating faster trails at bike parks globally results in faster and more serious injuries, I remember a piece in Dirt Mag in which Seb Kemp back then wrote something along the lines of doctors in Whistler treating patients with physical trauma similar to combat - which makes sense. 

There are so many variables and one of these is being able to self-assess oneself before committing to further tomfoolery, imho. There is no shame in NOT doing anything too risky or too dangerous either for that day or for that skill set. I ride with my kid as much as possible, and he likes all aspects of riding (from technical stuff to bike parks, skate parks and dj'ing), and is able to step away and call it a day if it does not feel right for him or is a bit too much. 

Gymnastics and a martial art that involves lots of falling and tumbling naturally can help, I agree. After a certain level of practise it feels as if the body takes over and does its thing, even if this only goes so far, same holds true for body armour and protective gear. The only thing that can be minimized is risk, not completely but in its magnitude. Even then, serious consequences, even death, can and do happen.

Re: squirrel catchers

So far I have not come across one that does work properly, unless completely fenced in and positioned in a way that riders can not get around, in Winterberg, Germany, the jump line has a squirrel catcher that a rider can not bypass, it is fenced in, they have to drop in in order to ride the jumpline - the drop being a joke, tho.

Other squirrel catchers I have seen could be bypassed pretty easily. In the end, it all comes down to the individual rider and his choice - do I ride above my head, do I ride tired, etc? And most can not even asess the risk properly, this holds true for me as well,

I think there is no definite answer, humans are somewhat hardwired for stupid things, as Dan John repeatedly states: We can not not do anything stupid.

Perhaps these cases will underscore the value of self-propelled XC biking. XC bikers are attacked from every direction (because is free?) by land owners.

XC means health, fast downhill not so much.

Posted by: Jotegir

It kind of tracks... there are literal CROWDS of people cleaning Dirt Merchant on a random Thursday at Whistler these days. A friend and I made the trip this fall and after riding every black and double black tech trail in fitz, we just did lap after lap of DM til close.  I had a moment of reflection a couple days later thinking about just how big some of those jumps are. There's one particularly huge jump that isn't really memorable near the top, it's sort of between some of the more famous step-uppy ones. A couple car lengths? That's a SLAM if messed up. What's the risk equivalent of that at the ski hill? I can't even really come up with a proper equivalent. Maybe cliff hucks? But even then, not too many people are really going big and they're mostly doing so on days with a modicum of powder induced safety rather than the dirt-crete of flow trails.  Not like the crowds on the huge trails every single day, all summer long. Our sport has progressed to the point that there are just so many people going huge in volumes that were unfathomable a couple years ago.

That is the big difference right there. If you go out on a 2+ hour trail ride only maybe 30 minutes of that would be in the danger zone (at the very most) with the rest being spent on climbing, traversing, etc. In the bike park you're in the danger zone the entire time you're not on the lift. As a bigger guy this gets even more dangerous because you need to go that much faster to reach the transitions. One crash in those conditions and I'm off to the clinic versus a tumble on a trail at trail speed.

Thinking more about this, why pick on mountain biking in particular? I was an insurance adjuster and part of my work involved claims in various sports. Guess what, there are catastrophic injuries in all sports. A pitcher was struck on the chest by a batted ball and died of heart failure. Spinal cord injuries and deaths in alpine skiing. Gymnastics had spinal injuries. In no contact hockey there were back injuries. Motor vehicle accidents see many injuries and deaths. People fall off ladders at home for fucks sake. If we start picking on one activity for costing too much for our health care system, we have to pick on many more activities. 

Insurance provides peace of mind. If we exclude one group from universal health care due to costs, who’s next?

It's because the rate of significant injuries in mtb is much higher than other sports. 

There's been a few people talking about this for a number of years, but it's not a conversation that's gotten a lot of attention. Maybe we're finally at that tipping point where people start to play more attention.

Perhaps the difference is that most/many in other sports / activities critical injuries are just a freak accidents that "should not happen".

In DH biking, to progress one needs to commit and push the envelope. You need to commit to a jump or hard obstacles. In skiing one can slow down if not feeling conformable. Rock climbers can secure the lines. For DH if you go faster, jump higher, further, the only logical push back is a fall.

Also, the entry to the sport is "low". You don't have to be in shape and work hard to enter a bike park. Just show me the money.

Simlilary, I used to have a motorcycle for fun. The faster, more fun driving at the end hits the expected reality, a crash. Thus I dropped my motorbike since I knew that this is just matter of time before a big trouble.

In mountain biking you can slow down and de-risk too. But I think in the local Shore/S2S MTB community, a lot of people feel a strong social pressure to take more risk. When riding with other strong riders, the general vibe is that you always have to ride the gnarliest trails and you have to go out of your comfort zone, because progression, bro.

I got pretty tired of it to be honest. For sure I did progress in my 10 years on the Shore and it did require going out of my comfort zone sometimes. But I also ride to get fit, not to get injured, and to decompress from being out of my comfort zone outside MTB, in challenging work or family situations for example, not to add another level of stress on top.

I tend to move to my own tune but in group rides that would often get some pushback/ridicule (or you just don't get invited next time) and I don't think everyone is able to withstand that. Some may take more risk than they really want, just to fit in.

I'm enjoying the more laid-back vibe on the Island and also having more mellower trail options, while still having enough challenging options for when I feel like it.

^^^ Right, but a bit ironic. They always say: bike with your buddies to be safe, don't go by yourself :)

Posted by: skooks

Posted by: Kever

Why did neck braces go out of style in the downhill realm? They make a lot of sense to me. My buddies and I wear them. 

Good question. I've been wondering the same thing.  I've heard you are more likely to break your collar bone but less likely to break your neck?  Neck braces used to be pretty common, but these days I see a lot of fast young riders without them who are very skilled, but who are likely to get seriously injured  if/when they crash.

Current designs account for collarbones. I don't see a downside to wearing a neck brace for DH. Pedaling yeah it's overkill, but for DH it's easy to rationalize. If it fits properly, you barely even notice it. For me, a neck brace is like a full face, I feel exposed if I don't wear one. The trail speeds have increased, and so has the risk. 

Took a decent crash over the weekend off a greasy ladderbridge and I'm glad I was wearing chest and back protection. I ended up with minor bruised ribs and a stiff back/neck, could've been worse. PSA, avoid wet wood unless it's heavily used cedar!