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Extreme Tuber in Westword

3K views 7 replies 6 participants last post by  benpetri 
#1 ·
Thought some might be interested - the feature article in the new Westword is about a guy that must be one of the extreme tubers that was on this board. Doesn't look like their website has the current issue up yet or I'd link it. A sad story, worth a read.
 
#4 ·
Yeah, that's a really sad story... I cut and pasted the tubing references in the story....


...In the spring, Lanahan turned to another edgy form of recreation: whitewater tubing. Lots of people on the swim team liked to tube Boulder Creek; months before he fled to Texas, Lanahan had even talked Spees into spotting him in a kayak while he tubed down the creek at dusk during the spring runoff, when the water is at its highest and tubing is banned. ("I thought that was the stupidest thing I'd ever done in my entire life," Spees mutters. "Then he talks me into doing the tube with him.") Now he wanted to take it further. He talked to kayakers about where the real action was.

Clear Creek, Poudre Canyon, North St. Vrain -- he and Spees went from Class 3 to Class 4 and 5 rapids. They wore helmets and two wetsuits each and pumped away with an eggbeater kick, hitting the rapids laterally, maneuvering between the rocks. Their ankles got the worst of it. "Once you got out of the water and warmed up, you just started bleeding," Spees recalls. "But we never hurt ourselves that bad. With tubing, you either get bruised a little bit or drown."

As with longboarding, Lanahan drew others into his new action. "He took me down Clear Creek, and I trusted him completely," says Gosch. "I knew if something would happen, he'd help me out and get everything back under control. But he would always talk about doing bigger things -- tubing and skydiving and all kinds of stuff. I said maybe he was taking it too far, maybe he was addicted to adrenaline. He just said, 'If I don't do it, who will?'"

There was something compulsive about the way Lanahan would stuff a Suburban full of inner tubes and people and head for the hills every weekend, looking for a new hole to check out, some monster course of chutes and haystacks. The obsession probably had to do with what was waiting for him back in Denver: long hours of moving furniture, meetings with his probation officer and regular participation in a sex-offender treatment program.

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....Last summer, Spees and Lanahan entered the Gore Canyon Race, one of Colorado's most competitive down-river races, open to rafters, kayakers, sledgers, creature craft -- and two maniacs in inner tubes. The pair caromed like pinballs down the river, but they finished. The next day, they went to check out a national longboarding competition in Vail and ended up entering the fray on borrowed equipment. The day after that, they boarded the bike path between Vail and Copper Mountain...

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"I am now, while alive, very much dead inside. Only the extreme ends of the spectrum seem to impact me. I fight to feel, I tube to feel, I board to tell me that I'm still alive. But it is all mute to me now. I am in so much pain that any life I could salvage is not worth the process... "
 
#5 ·
Well, it wasn't my intention to leave you hanging. If you're interested you should probably read the article, but the Reader's Digest Condensed Version is this guy committed suicide by hanging himself near the Flatirons last fall. Presumably, it was in part due to the stress from the probation program he was sentenced to after signing a plea bargain for a charge of sexual assault (apparently controversional charges).
 
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