Stephen Murray Road to Recovery

This Stephen Murray feature over at EXPN.com might be the most important action sports story you read all year. Murray was a superhero to me (remember that double backflip at X Games in 2001?) long before his devastating 2007 accident, and I was actually in the stands when he slammed on the Dew Tour dirt contest in Baltimore last year. It's coming up fast on the one-year anniversary of that crash.

One of my best friends suffered almost the exact same injury about eight years ago playing in some waves in Mexico, and when Murray went down and subsequent reports on his health came out over the next hours/days/weeks/months, I took it about as hard as one might take news of Superman being paralyzed. That's not an accidental Superman reference: The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation and the work Christopher Reeve set in motion before his death probably represents Murray's best chance at seeing his dreams of walking again some day come true.

Murray's story is both heartbreaking and inspiring. The physical, psychological, and emotional gains he's made in his recovery and discusses in the EXPN article are nothing short of miraculous, and I've been stoked to see how fully the BMX and action sports community has rallied to support Murray and his family. It's a brutal reminder that the sports we love – partly because they are dangerous and put us perpetually near the edge of human possibility – actually are... dangerous. I'm nursing a blown rotator cuff this month after a snowboarding accident, and even that level of physical therapy is a bummer: What we do is dangerous, and we need to do everything we can to be smart and support each other and our heroes when somebody goes down hard.

Here are a couple of simple things everybody who reads this article ought to do:

1. Check out the Stephen Murray Family Fund website to learn more about how the action sports community is helping, and to make a donation.

2. Help out the cause by hooking up one of those cool black and yellow "STAY STRONG" shirts and the blue STAYSTRONG wristbands that everyone who's anyone in action sports is rocking.

3. Drop $10 on a set of the Superman "Go Forward" dog tags to help support the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation's critical work promoting spinal chord injury research.

4. Click on the small Facebook, del.icio.us, digg, or Stumble Upon icons below to share this story and make sure the EXPN article and the three suggestions above get circulated far and wide.

5. STAY STRONG!

– Colin Bane