WABASHA, Minn. >> In the weeks before Olympic cyclist Kelly Catlin killed herself, she felt her mind slipping.

She could not focus on her postgraduate schoolwork at Stanford. In an email she sent to her family, a coach and a friend in January, she said her thoughts were “never-ending spinning, spinning, spinning” as if they were “never at rest, never at peace.”

Catlin told her sister, Christine, that seeking therapy meant she was weak and she would rather suffer. She told her brother, Colin, that she thought she was going insane and she worried that she was a danger to others because she was filled with rage.

Catlin was poised for stardom at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, where she had a reasonable shot for Olympic gold that eluded her in 2016. With the advanced degree from Stanford she was working toward, she could have her pick of jobs in computers.

How, those who knew her are asking now, could she find no purpose to keep living? How could she be so unknown to the people closest to her?

“You think you know your children,” her mother, Carolyn Emory, said, “but there was so much about Kelly, especially this secret personal code she lived by, that was startling to me in the end. She was very private.”

It was hard to absorb that just months before in November, on the podium at a World Cup track cycling race, where Catlin’s squad finished second in the team pursuit, she soaked in the moment. A three-time world champion, Catlin considered the victory a prelude to finally winning an Olympic gold medal.

Off the track, she was fulfilling a lifelong obsession with numbers and order through her academics and planning for a career in Silicon Valley.

Catlin’s father, Dr. Mark Catlin, a pathologist, blames her suicide on a combination of factors, including her success-at-all-costs personality, overtraining, stress, and physical injuries from a January suicide attempt about a month before she was found dead in her dorm. On both occasions, she inhaled noxious gas.

But the breaking point, he and other family members believe, was a concussion she sustained during a training ride Jan. 5.

“I wake up every two to three hours at night to go through all of these permutations on what could have saved her,” her father said. “I can’t help but wonder what she would’ve done with her life.”

Catlin and her triplet siblings, Christine and Colin, grew up in Arden Hills, Minnesota. Her parents — her mother is a former Alzheimer’s researcher — met in a lab dissecting brains.

The Catlins lived in a large house with an indoor gymnasium. They were a family of introverts who enjoyed staying at home for tea parties. For Kelly, Christine and Colin, school and sports were equally important. They excelled at both.

Kelly was the super-focused athlete, a first-chair violinist who studied nonstop. Christine was the creative writer and runner who played three instruments. Colin was the math whiz who played guitar and rode bikes competitively.

“Our parents always told us that we could be great at anything we wanted to, if we worked hard enough,” Christine said. “Looking back, maybe we kind of twisted that into thinking we weren’t worth anything if we weren’t the best. I think Kelly believed that.”

Christine Catlin described her sister as a once outgoing, friendly girl who began closing herself off in middle school because she was “so obsessed with success.”

Kelly Catlin also began to limit her social interactions to “robotic social motions,” as Catlin herself put it in the January note to family and friends. Around third grade, Catlin established her lifelong code to live by and included some of it in the note, which was shared with The New York Times:

Fear not physical discomfort. Never love. Never engage in a relationship that could be defined as having a significant other. (In my case, a so-called “boyfriend.”) Never allow yourself to become close enough to another that their actions or inactions might cause you (any amount of) distress or pain. If kindness and gentleness are at all an option, they are the only option.

Colin and Christine Catlin were cycling for a local development team, NorthStar, when Kelly quit high school soccer and joined them. She loved long training rides and used cycling as a way to practice memorization, another passion.

“She liked that cycling kept her mind focused, but I think she liked it most when she started winning everything,” Colin said. “Her mentality was, if you wanted to be an Olympian, all you had to do was train hard.”

Kelly Catlin was drawn to the science of cycling. She wasn’t comfortable with the social aspect of it. In the notes she wrote in her final weeks, she acknowledged not having many friends.

“It’s not that she didn’t want friends,” her brother said. “It was just a matter of priorities. And her priority was to be successful and respected.”

The concussion that her family said changed everything happened Jan. 5, when she crashed while riding with her professional road cycling team, Rally UHC Cycling. A team spokesman said there was “no indication that she hit her head or had a serious injury” when it evaluated her.

But at a national team training camp two days later, Catlin felt dizzy and could not continue working out. She told the team about her crash. Medical personnel at the Olympic Training Center placed her on concussion protocol and suggested rest, said Guillermo Rojas, a spokesman for USA Cycling.

Yet Catlin continued to complain to her parents of headaches, sensitivity to light and trouble sleeping. And this was coming months after a fall in October that left her with a broken arm and weakened interest in the national team.

“There was this profound apathy,” her father said.

After the concussion, she simply could not focus anymore on school or cycling — or anything. In late January, she wrote that she had started planning her suicide before her crash and concussion. But her family thinks that was not true.

“For the first time in her life, Miss Stoical couldn’t force herself to go on,” Mark Catlin said. “This is when she began planning her suicide.”

After her first suicide attempt, she spent about a week in a hospital psychiatric ward. When she left that treatment, she began attending group therapy sessions, which she deemed useless, her parents said, and she said she could not find an available psychiatrist who met her needs.

When Catlin moved back into her on-campus apartment, her parents flew back to Minnesota. They banked on her assurances that she wouldn’t try to kill herself again.

“She fooled us all,” her mother said.

The suicide attempt and concussion had damaged her brain and heart, her family said, so competing at the world championships on Feb. 27 was not possible. She wrote a blog posted the day the championships began in which she described managing her cycling career with her graduate studies as “juggling with knives” and said, “I really am dropping a lot of them.” In a note she wrote in March, she said, “If I am not an athlete, I am nothing.”

Christine Catlin’s phone rang in late February, and it was Kelly. They had not spoken at length in years because they were busy with their own lives after high school, but now Kelly wanted to talk. Christine found it strange. It was nothing Kelly would have done before her concussion.

Kelly said she worried that the physical effects of her concussion or her first suicide attempt — or both — were affecting her judgment.

She asked: What could Christine see her doing in the future?

The sister answered: You could do public speaking about suicide awareness and help people. Or you could do remote computer programming so you don’t have to be around people.

“You could bike, if you want to,” Christine said. “Or not.”

Kelly seemed to feel better after the 2 1/2-hour call.

Still, she said, “If things don’t change in a month, I’m probably going to kill myself.”

Christine begged her not to do it.

“OK,” Kelly said, with a tone Christine now realizes was less than convincing.

Two weeks after that conversation, Kelly Catlin’s life was over.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

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