RIP: Former UCLA runner and Olympic Marathon Trials qualifier Daniel De La Torre dead at 29

So sad. Seems like he was only 27 or 28.

29.

Here is a UCLA press release on his death:

uclabruins.com

UCLA Mourns the Loss of Daniel De La Torre - UCLA

The Alhambra, Calif., native was 29.

Open link

We changed the title to make it more descriptive, adding in his age and his UCLA ties.

Horrible news. My heart goes out to his family and friends in this time of grieving.

RIP Emilio Daniel De La Torre. I was always inspired by the workouts he would crush on Strava.

It is being reported he died by suicide. In my experience, when someone dies by suicide or overdose, no one wants to talk about it. It needs to be talked about. There is help available for those who are struggling.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline offers services to talk to a skilled counselor. If you are feeling distressed and need to talk to a counselor, please call 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

Talking about it merely causes more people to consider it. Suicides surge in geographical areas after one happens.

I thought that 988 was the new number?

If true, then maybe we need to be sensitive about how we talk about it, but not talking about it all is the worst possible choice. There was a pretty talented local runner from my area who killed himself this spring, and we went through the same thing you're suggesting, everyone would get angsty if you tried to mentioned suicide. After a few weeks, the family settled on a little white lie that actually he was just cleaning his gun and it went off accidentally, despite all the evidence suggesting otherwise. They even took that story to the media which repeated it, and now you'll get people wagging their fingers at you if you suggest it was suicide. And so the upshot is that nobody learned anything from the poor young man's death. Nobody is talking about the signs you might see that a friend is suffering, nobody is talking about prevention, nobody is sharing the hotline number or any other resources that could help someone, and so forth. The young man killed himself and everyone's anxiety around the subject and their choice to keep quiet or even believe a lie about the circumstances of his death might make them feel better momentarily or avoid having a difficult talk, but I'm convinced an opportunity to save lives was lost because of that anxiety and because of that unwillingness to have a hard conversation.

I wonder how often that hotline is even used since someone who is in a suicidal state of mind is probably not thinking with the level of clarity as others. Calling the hotline requires first that you acknowledge that you do have a problem to workout. It may be even harder to convince someone to talk about their situation with a complete stranger over the phone.

I think a healthy as in existent social life with people you can confide in will help more than the hotline. If you feel isolated from the people around you and do not have the trust to open up to them, you will be less inclined to call the hotline.

This is why the stigma about therapy and mental health is so devastating. Particularly for men. Men feel like they have nobody to turn to when they are going through a low time. Even if they have a large group of supportive friends. So they say screw it. The stigma that men are supposed to be strong makes it such that we bottle everything up until we pop. We need to make therapy more common and accepted. This starts at a young ago so that men feel comfortable talking to someone about their feelings. I’m 35. Did any men my age or older talk to a counselor in high school about their troubles? Or a therapist ever? Nope. We were the last generation of bottle up my feelings men. Hopefully we are the last.

My son had suicidal episode a few years ago and called the police on his own. They took him to a mental health wing of a children’s hospital where he spent 2 weeks. All has been well since then.

As someone that battles depression, anxiety, and PTSD suicide is an incredibly selfish and preventable cause of death. The sufferer may want the pain to end but it never ends for the survivors. A few months ago I was hospitalized with celiac and IBS when I was released from the hospital the bowel pain was unbearable I could not even travel in a car without having panic. The thoughts of wanting it to end were ever present but my wife sought help for me and the correct anti-depressant medications have made living comfortable again. People should know they are not alone when the mental pain is present but it is important to seek help.

Do not label a suicide victim as selfish. Do better. May this young man RIP.

In some, but not all cases of course, the tendency to suicide may be largely influenced by expectations set by society and one's perceived failure to reach those expectations. Usually the expectations are externally driven. Once we learn to tune out what society expects and instead focus on measuring up to our real internally-driven goals we will feel less despair.

Those just represent a subset but some feel genuinely hopelessness not due to failure to live up to some mark set externally but due to terminal illnesses, etc.

I competed against Daniel in High School, we were in the same league (cross country, track) He was an absolute beast. (4:10, 9:02) We would warm up together and talk at meets, discuss PR's, Season Goals, and where we wanted to run in college. He was XC State Champion, NCAA All-American at UCLA. (23:44, 13:46) He was such a good friend and even though we weren't teammates, he treated us like we were. Always positive and uplifting, motivating us to reach that next level. This was such a heartbreaking loss to us who knew him. We love him very much, may he rest in peace.

You have no idea what this guy was going through so I'd suggest not making a**hole comments about a deceased person you don't know on a running message board.

Dude just log off, you have know idea what you're talking about. You have no idea of the pain people go through on a daily basis.

This made me want to chime in with my experience as someone who knew of Daniel but never knew him personally. I also ran against him in high school at Division 4 SS meets "Against" should probably have a healthy layer of quotation marks because I think the closest I ever got to him was maybe 3 minutes back at Mt SAC. He was a great runner! State champ and I remember in races you could see he was just built to run and would take off from the start, often standing by himself because he was the only runner from La Salle to qualify for post-season. Super inspiring runner for a relatively weak division in the strong CA SS section and, even though I was about 20 miles down the freeway, inspired me a lot.

I was also at UCLA while he was there and can remember seeing him at meets at Drake. I remember a friend on the running club who also ran Div 4 SS talking about Daniel and how inspiring he was for his own running. Even going back to meets at Drake after college, I'd occasionally see him hanging around with people on the team and always talking and laughing. From the outside it really looked like he had everything: state champ in high school, D1 athlete and NCAA all-american, and just this year running the Olympic trials. Even more important was that he seemed like a great teammate and friend. I found out about this from Rai Benjamin's story a couple days ago and it's just heartbreaking. You really never know what someone is going through from the outside and even those close sometimes don't understand the depths someone might be hurting.