SUMMERVILLE, S.C. (WCIV) — You may see a new and colorful bike around town. This bike serves a purpose, bringing awareness to first responders’ mental health.
The mission is to spark conversation about mental health and suicide prevention and to help people find their outlet.
“It is a very special bike decked out from tip to tail, head to toe in purple and turquoise. We’ve got 23 sponsors that have all contributed to this build and to further our message,” said the founder of the Nobody Fights Alone MTB Project, Colt Roy.
Roy has spent the last six months on this project.
“In the world of first responders, mental health is an all-or-nothing conversation, and we’re trying to make it a relevant conversation that we have a little bit more often,” said Roy. “We want to let people know that it’s okay to talk about this stuff. We want to let people know that it’s okay to talk about their feelings, and if they’re not okay that they can say something. No one’s gonna think poorly of them.”
This is a project that touches the heart of Gary Tressler, the father of firefighter (A1C) Dylan Lashley, who passed in 2019.
“This is something that I wish would’ve been in place long before, you know? There’s so many things that we don’t do that I think we need to do for the mental health people and acknowledging that there is an issue and trying everything that we can do to take care of it,” said Tressler.
The bike was revealed Friday evening at Spokeworks Bicycle Shop in Summerville.
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All t-shirt, sticker, and coin sale proceeds went to the Lowcountry Firefighter Support Team.
“Back in the early days when I first started in fire, we didn’t talk about mental health. We didn’t talk about suicide. Oh, no, not at all. But now we’ve embraced it. We talk about it, we reach out, and we try to save people. We try to get them in positions where they can get help,” said Gerald Mishoe, Executive Director of the Lowcountry Firefighter Support Team. “This bicycle will join the many other things, old fire trucks and signs and banners and whatever else that we have, reaching out to people to let them know that we care about them and we want to help them.”
Spokeworks owner Mike Haldeman was happy to watch the bike come together.
To see all the big names in the industry donate their talents to a custom build is really cool,” said Haldeman. “To see this many people supporting something that I think is a really good cause is, it feels really good.”