Colleen Kelly

To Die Twice, Then Run A Half-Marathon
After a horrific bike accident, Colleen Kelly Alexander is running Vermont City this Sunday.
By
Michelle Hamilton;


Published
May 24, 2013




For the last year of Colleen Kelly Alexander’s life, listening to music while training has been more than a way to pass the miles. It’s been the only thing keeping her from having a mid-run breakdown.

On October 8, 2011, on a cloudless fall morning in southern Connecticut, the competitive triathlete was riding her bike on Boston Post Road in Madison en route home when a 30-ton freighter slammed into her.

The pain was intense, like fire, Alexander says. The truck ripped open her belly, broke her pelvis and legs, severely damaged her leg muscles, and tore the skin off parts of her lower body. There were sirens and voices, but the sound she remembers was that of her heart.  

It began pounding when she saw the truck coming. As she lay bleeding, she listened to its labored attempt to keep her alive. She screamed, thinking that as long as she was yelling, her heart was beating.

But as the ambulance speed to Yale-New Haven Hospital, Alexander’s heart stopped.

It took medics 20 minutes to resuscitate her. Twenty-four hours later, they’d have to revive her again. More than a month would pass before she could breathe on her own.

As her body slowly recovered, she returned to running. But the heavy, rhythmic sound of exercise that used to bring her peace, now caused panic.

“Breathing for me equated to death. I would smell the tires, feel my body cracking open,” Alexander, now 37, says by phone from her home in Clinton, Connecticut. “A lot of times during training I would stop on the side of the road and start sobbing.”

The alternative rock sounds of Switchfoot, songs like “This is Your Life” and “Dare You to Move,” drowned out her inhales and exhales, letting her log the miles.

Wednesday night, for the first time, Alexander left the headphones at home. She and her husband, Sean, went out for a five-mile run, their last training session before this Sunday’s Vermont City Marathon in Burlington, Vermont. Sean is running the full distance and Colleen will join him for the second half.

The race is a homecoming for Alexander. She used to live and work in the area and as part of a job in youth advocacy—her career was in nonprofit programming—she trained 12 teenagers to run the marathon relay. Just before the accident, she had decided the 2012 event would be her first half-marathon. This Sunday's race will no longer be her inaugural 13.1-miler—she finished three earlier this year—but she’s excited to return.

“I wanted to embrace the sounds of the people and the music of this race,” says Alexander. “The energy at the Burlington race is just awesome and I wanted to take that in without fear.”

Alexander and Sean ran along a residential road in their neighborhood, then along the waterfront overlooking Long Island Sound.

“I listened to the birds and talked with my husband,” she says.

“It felt good. And I didn’t freak out on the road. And there were trucks out there,” she adds with a laugh.

As for her breath: “I listened to it.”

Alexander estimates that her heart now pumps the blood of more than 125 different people through her body.

“I will never know who they are,” she says. “Red, yellow, black, white, gay, straight, but the fact that I have been saved by all these heroes, all these blood donors, is so beyond empowering. It’s not about me anymore and that finally started clicking with me.”

Alexander gives her finishers medals to the doctors and medical staff who pieced her lower body back together and helped her learn to run again.

There are many to distribute. Alexander has completed 20-plus events since the accident. Most recently, she finished the Ten Penny Ale Shamrock Duathlon (5-K run, 26-K bike, 5-K run) in Glastonbury, Connecticut last weekend (pictured above; she's at center). She finished in 2:45:20.

Her 5-K times at the race—38:06 and 47:00—are a mark of her progress. In her first race back, she walked the Leprechaun 2-Mile Walk on St. Patrick’s Day in two and half hours with a walker, her colostomy bag in tow.

One of her most memorable racing moments came this March when Matt Long (pictured with Alexander at left), the New York City firefighter who was crushed by a bus and went on to run the New York City Marathon, joined her at mile 10 of the NYC Half. The two had become Facebook friends after she read his book The Long Run. The race was the first time they met in person.

“We talked a lot about how to move forward, how to handle chronic pain and people asking questions and you wanting to talk about it and not wanting to talk about it,” she says.

Alexander is in near-constant communication with her doctors. She seeks their input on her training level, though occasionally she pushes the boundaries. Once, after “wogging”—her word for jogging with a walker—a 10-mile race, she approached her orthopedic and rehab specialist, Michael Baumgaertner, M.D., about competing in a 5-K without the walker. He said to keep it easy, try for one mile. She ran the full 3.1.

These days, Alexander trains more than five days a week, running three or four of those days, including a 10- to 14-mile long run. She intersperses running with indoor biking, outdoor group rides (she’s not ready to ride solo yet), and lots of time on the elliptical, because it’s less painful than other activities.

Exercise, though, fits in around a heavy surgery schedule. Alexander has had 19 operations. There are seven more to go. She still has a six-inch open wound in her left leg, 50 percent less muscle on her left leg than her right, and a kidney that may be failing, among other issues.

Alexander speaks openly about what happened, brining up uncomfortable topics like anal incontinence, the fact that her she won't be able to have children, and that the pain is intense.

When asked what hurts when she runs, she laughs, but apologizes, saying basically the whole section that was run over: her lower back, her pelvis, hips, leg muscles, ankles. 

“As much as it hurts, training helps my body psychologically recover from the trauma,” she says.

There is more to it than that, of course. She has a strong desire to shout about the strength of the human spirit to the world, both literally and through athletics. After Vermont, where she hopes to maintain 11-minute-miles, she’s eyeing the Hartford Marathon in October as part of her new role a spokesperson for the Red Cross. There’s also an Ironman in her future, and motivational speaking.

In those talks, she’ll no doubt tell the story of the man she thinks about from time to time.

“When I was at Yale, a young man came in, apparently the same night I did,” she says. “He was 19 and in an auto accident. He was a musician and had a full scholarship to go to college. He had no open wounds but he snapped his neck. We were in the separate trauma ORs for same time, 8 to 10 hours. He wasn’t resuscitated, but he was left with complete paralysis. When I went to Gaylord [Specialty Healthcare], he went too. I eventually was able to get to a standing position and start taking step. He never did, and he never will.”

She pauses.

“So many people, you know, crap happens and people can’t run, so until I can’t, I will.”