Iron Heart: The True Story of How I Came Back From the Dead (25 page)

After seven and a half hours, I finally arrive at the transition area by the pier. I repeat to myself, “Don’t crash now; don’t you dare crash!” I cautiously click my feet out of the pedals and a volunteer hurries over to assist me. I have trouble walking, but I have to keep moving if I want to finish before the midnight cutoff. I pick up my run transition bag, then sit down in the changing tent. An NBC cameraman is by my side. Two Ironman volunteers drape me with cold towels. I’m fumbling to put my running shoes on, as another volunteer dries me off and sprays sunscreen on my sun-baked shoulders.

I stand up on shaky legs and strap a hydration belt around my waist for extra fluids. It’s time to go “run” a marathon.

The crowds excite me. I’m drawing energy from all the spectators as I slowly jog through Kona. “Keep it up, number 163! Lookin’ good,” one lady shouts holding up a big poster board that says Good luck Ironman athletes! When I pass a group of surfer dudes with mohawks who are standing by their sticker-plastered pickups, one yells, “You’re a beast!”

A female racer in a sky-blue bikini, sporting an Ironman logo on her gorgeously tanned stomach, smiles at me and says that my running stride looks good. I thank her and do a double take as I pass her.

Even though my legs are stiff and wooden, I make it to the five-mile aid station on Alii Drive in fairly good shape. My sole concern is foot blisters caused by all the cups of water that I’ve been splashing all over my shoes and socks.

The next several miles become increasingly tough. I decide to walk one minute for every mile jogged. The walking serves as a small reward for making headway.

I begin having tunnel vision, barely noticing any of the other runners, most of whom now pass me. My focus is the hot asphalt and where to place my feet.

My longest training run had been two hours. That took me to ten miles. As I make my way up the steep Palani Road, out of the town, and onto the Queen K Highway, I reach my endurance threshold. Keeping my feet moving is all I can hope for. Right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot, and so on. I have gone from jogging to a light bouncing walk. My pace has slowed to a fifteen-minute mile.

“Hey, Brian! Over here, son, over here.” I hear the sound of my dad’s voice coming from a large group of people to my left. I see him with my mom. They ask how I’m feeling.

“I’m doing all right. Things are good,” I lie with a straight face.

The sun is starting to set on the Queen K. The warm yellows and bright oranges in the sky mix with horizontal bands of blues and purples. The pros and top age-groupers have already finished the race several hours ago. I envy them. I still have a long way to go. At the next aid station, a volunteer hands me a Day-Glo chemical stick to wear around my neck because there are no lights along the pitch-dark Queen K.

I now celebrate each mile with a three-minute walking spree. No matter how badly this hurts, the suffering is only temporary, I keep reminding myself. Nor am I the only one experiencing extreme discomfort. Some runners are bent over like hunchbacks. Others are walking. Several are just standing and trying to rub out a leg cramp. To the few people whom I happen to edge by, I say something motivational, such as “Keep it up,” “You’re doing good,” or “We’re almost there.” Misery likes company on the Queen K.

Night comes quickly in the tropics. The magical hues and luminescent colors in the sky have faded to black. The solid darkness reminds me of being in the coma. Except for the terrifying dreams, it was absolutely dark most of the time. The only things now visible are neon green glow sticks jiggling about racers’ necks.

Unlike other back-of-the-packers, I sometimes have company. Every few minutes, a moped zips past with an NBC cameraman on the back. An NBC red convertible Mustang is also trailing me. Ken the cameraman sits in the backseat. He’s a great guy. I met him in September when he came to my house to get footage of my parents and me for the NBC Ironman telecast.

Each mile is devoured in slow motion. Thankfully, it’s much cooler. While my body hurts all over from the accumulated exhaustion, it’s a different kind of hurt than I experienced in the hospital. Then, the pain was out of my control. I was its unwilling victim. But here, I’m causing the pain by running. It’s self-inflicted. I could always stop, quit the race. But that will never happen. I won’t allow it.

I finally leave the Queen K and make a left turn onto the road to the Energy Lab. The descent is gentle on my legs. They feel as if they are moving on their own. At the turnaround aid station, music is blasting and volunteers wish me good luck.

The long, gradual climb out of the Energy Lab requires more than luck. I slow to a walk. All of a sudden, I start crying because I realize that I will finish the race.

When I get back to the Queen K, I begin to jog again when a silver Mustang convertible drives up alongside me. It’s Bill Rudell and the Cannondale crew who are excited to see that I’ve made it this far. I have been out on the course for thirteen hours. Only six more miles to the end—little more than ninety minutes if I don’t stop.

Another mile later, the three LifeSport coaches pull up alongside me in a car—Lance, Paul, and Alister who have played an important role in my training for the past six weeks and taught me how to do an Ironman virtually overnight. They let me know I’m way ahead of the estimated time they were expecting me to finish—which was close to midnight.

When they leave, Ken and the NBC gang return. It’s easy to ignore the all-encompassing exhaustion when a camera is on you.

With just three miles to go, my body will only permit me to walk two hundred yards followed by a painfully slow jog for two hundred yards—walk, slow jog, repeat. My swollen feet feel like cinder blocks and my puffy, swollen legs are barely bending enough to get one foot in front of the other.

I’m so bewildered and depleted by fatigue that I temporarily lose sense of where I am. I have to remind myself that I’m in Hawaii, attempting to finish the Ironman.

With two miles remaining, the NBC camera crew heads back to the finish to await my arrival. I find myself alone in the dark. I savor these last miles, knowing they represent the culmination of a long journey that’s taken me from dying to living. When my heart rate was soaring, doctors feared the worse. But now, as my heart is beating strong and fast, I know that I’m living—living my dream.

I make the turn onto Alii Drive. Thousands of spectators line both sides of the street. The finish line is only several hundred yards away. I pick up the pace to an awkward walk and trot. Sheer adrenaline carries me forward.

I see the finish line area, which is lit up like daylight. Fifty yards, twenty-five yards, five yards, then I’m home! I walk across the finish line. My time is fourteen hours and forty-two minutes. An NBC cameraman hovers nearby. My parents rush to greet me. The mood is beyond emotional. Tears. Hugs. Smiles. I feel completely reborn, as if I have been given the gift of a normal life and all the limitations I once had have vanished. Just over three years ago, doctors didn’t think I would ever walk again. I had been the boy in the car crash, the dying boy, the boy whose heart stopped numerous times, the coma boy, the boy who couldn’t speak or move, the skeleton boy in a wheelchair. But all that is now part of the past on this triumphant night in Kona.

The announcer shouts to the crowd of thousands, “Brian Boyle, at twenty-one years old, is an Ironman!” Yes I am.

W
hen I returned home from Hawaii, a media whirlwind was waiting. I did interviews with local and international newspapers, radio stations, television news programs, and various magazines. But the really big day occurred six weeks later on December 1, 2007, when the ninetyminute Ironman telecast aired on NBC. I watched the show at home with my parents and our bulldog Daisy. It felt great to relive that long day in Kona. Three of the four “inspirational triathletes” finished—Charles Plaskon came in seven minutes after I did, while Scott Rigsby just made the cutoff in 16:42. Sadly, Scott Johnson did not finish. Underlining the greatness of the best professionals were the swift times of the winners: Australian Chris McCormack in 8:15 and Englishwoman Chrissie Wellington in 9:08.

I was flattered to see my personal story highlighted on the NBC show. I thought my fifteen minutes of fame were over, but in the days that followed I was surprised to receive emails from people all over the world. These emails weren’t just from fellow auto accident victims, but people who had bouts with cancer, illness, or who had suffered war injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan. All had experienced life-altering circumstances. All were survivors.

On January 1, 2008, I resumed my triathlon training because I wanted to see if one day I could qualify for the Ironman. With more than six weeks to train this time, I’m giving myself several years to get in the kind of shape I saw in the top triathletes in Kona.

My first step was to sign up for online coaching by six-time Hawaii Ironman champion Mark Allen, who retired from competition in 1996. His personalized training program involves working out anywhere from twenty to thirty hours a week.

Cannondale’s Bill Rudell was good with his promise. He sent me the Slice bike as my gift for finishing Kona as well as for being the recipient of the 2007 Cannondale Ironman Determination Award. With the sleek bike, I gradually improved my speed and road-handling skills.

In addition to all the training, I enrolled full-time at St. Mary’s. I also continued to get calls from national media reporters. My comeback story appeared on
ESPN.com
, Comcast Sports, NBC News, Fox News, and in the
Washington Post.
The Catholic monthly
Inside the Vatican
named me as one of its Top Ten People of the Year.

With all this media exposure, I decided to serve as a testimonial speaker with the American Red Cross. Without the thirty-six blood transfusions and thirteen plasma treatments that came from the Red Cross, I never would have made it out of Intensive Care alive. Every two seconds, someone in the United States needs blood. Donors are the only source, so I want to help as much as I can in this vital, life-giving effort.

The next half-Ironman triathlon I did was the Eagleman 70.3 Triathlon in Cambridge, Maryland, on June 8, 2008. I cut two hours off my time from my first race, the Steelhead. Surprisingly, the bike was my strongest of the three disciplines; I was third in my age group.

The next month, I was named PowerBar’s Athlete of the Month. I also received the 2008 Fitness Inspiration Award from the IdeaFit World Health and Fitness Association, the ceremony for which took place at the Barry Manilow Theatre in Las Vegas—the same stage where Elvis Presley performed many times. Dan O’Brien, the 1996 U.S. Olympic Decathlon gold medalist, presented me with the award in front of an audience of three thousand.

After returning from Las Vegas, I flew to Canada to compete in the half-Ironman in Newfoundland, where my late grandmother, Helen Lineberger, was raised. I dedicated the race to her memory. The Canadian television news crews, newspapers, and radio stations covered me throughout the entire week. I was able to lower my half-Ironman time another ten minutes.

I was also honored to be included in
Men’s Health
magazine’s twentieth-year-anniversary edition, which highlighted some of the biggest health and fitness stories over the past two decades. I was awestruck to be included in the same company as Tiger Woods and my personal athletic inspiration, Lance Armstrong.

Right before Christmas, I flew to Clearwater, Florida, to compete in the 2008 Foster Grant Ironman 70.3 World Championship, where I was able to take another twenty minutes off my overall time. It took me only 5:09:14 to finish the race. My grandfather, parents, Aunt Kati, Uncle Tom, and cousins Matt and Hayley, who were always there for me when I was in the hospital and in rehab, came and watched me do the race.

After Florida, I received a call from the
Ellen DeGeneres Show
asking if I would like to be a guest. They wanted to spotlight an Ironman triathlete with an inspirational story. I told the producer I used to watch Ellen’s show when I was waking up from my coma and that she was able to make me smile when I was paralyzed.

My parents and I were flown to Los Angeles, California. On the day of the show’s taping in the Warner Bros. Studio, I was brought into my own dressing room, which had my name printed outside the door. There was a huge gift basket that included a bathrobe. The two other guests on the show were pop singer Jessica Simpson and actor Chace Crawford, a young star on the popular cable television show
Gossip Girl.
I was the last guest to appear. The lights, camera, and backstage action were overwhelming. Ellen’s staff was wonderful. It was incredible to meet Ellen and get the opportunity to tell her how much her show meant to me when I was in Intensive Care.

I haven’t slowed down, either. I ran in the March 2009 SunTrust National Marathon in Washington, D.C., and my time was 4:15:12.

While I’m honored by all the media attention and national recognition, it is my intention and desire to make a positive impact on others who have gone through or who are currently going through a tragic, life-altering experience. I was fortunate to be given the gift of life thanks to the support of my parents, hospital, family, and friends. I hope to help other survivors find the faith, confidence, and determination that recovery is within their reach, too.

I still have a lot of ground to cover in life. I will never recapture all that lost time spent in the hospital, or the arduous months of rehab. But that period in my life, I now realize, only marked the beginning of a long unfinished journey. I plan to enjoy every moment.

Life is to be lived. There are no bad days. Every day is a good day.