Extreme Bullshit

This was the featured obit in the Times:

Barbara Warren, a champion endurance athlete in the over-60 age group, died in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Tuesday , three days after crashing during the bicycling portion of the Santa Barbara Triathlon. She was 65 and lived in San Diego.

Her twin sister, Alexandra Drake, told The San Diego Union-Tribune that Ms. Warren had broken her neck in the fall and was paralyzed from the neck down, breathing with the help of a ventilator, when she signaled, by blinking her eyes and nodding, that she wanted the ventilator turned off.

“She wanted to leave,” Ms. Drake told the newspaper in confirming the death. “No athlete would like to have a life with only their eyes talking.”

Ms. Warren, an Austrian-born psychologist, competed 13 times in the Ironman Triathlon World Championship in Hawaii, a grueling event consisting of a 2.4-mile ocean swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run, finishing eight times in the top five in her age group and winning in 2003, at the age of 60. She ran a seven-day race across the Sahara Desert, competed in double and triple triathlons, and with her sister, also an endurance athlete, often competed in bicycle relays, including the Race Across America, in which they took turns riding, covering nearly 3,000 miles in less than 10 days.

In addition to her sister, her survivors include her husband, Tom Warren, the 1979 Ironman champion, and two daughters.

“This is a woman who understood adventure sport and the risks that go with it,” Bob Babbitt, a triathlete and the publisher of Competitor magazine, said in a phone interview Friday. “We all know that when you do this stuff, going 30 or 40 miles per hour downhill with 130 pounds of pressure in one-inch tires, this stuff happens. You do this in a car, and the car hits a rock, no problem. The bike hits a rock, it’s death. We understand that.”

I have known dozens of people who communicated final wishes with eyeblinks, but they died of ALS, not some damn fool endurance freakshow. I also know of someone who changed the world with eyeblinks. He has lived with ALS his entire adult life. His name is Stephen Hawking.

Here's another link. I'm in there. (view with IE)

Yeah, these events are used as charity platforms, and I saw two ALS nonprofits on the Ironman(tm) recipient rolls. So what? Get real.