Tough Mudder Four Months After a Crippling Ski Wreck

In February 2011 I hit a snowmaker at Breckenridge at over 50 miles per hour. Collapsed lung. Aortic bleeding. Fractured sternum and clavicle. Six fractured ribs. Thirteen broken bones in total. Life-flighted to Denver in a helicopter. Total medical costs: $735,000.

While I was in the hospital, my friend Andre came to visit. He looked at me in that bed and said, "I want to do a Tough Mudder. Will you do it with me? You need a goal." That was the moment. Not a doctor telling me I would recover. Not a motivational speech. A friend saying, "I need you to do this with me, and you need something to aim at." Andre became my accountability partner for healing. Every week of rehab had a purpose because there was a date on the calendar and a friend who was counting on me to be there.

Four months later I was standing at the start line of a Tough Mudder at 9,500 feet in the Colorado mountains, next to Andre.

I want to be clear about something. I was not healed. I was functional, barely. My body had knitted itself back together enough to move, and I had been training carefully in the weeks leading up to the event, but I was not the same man who had been skiing that morning in February. I was diminished, weakened, and terrified of what the course would do to my body.

I did it anyway. Not because I am brave. Because the alternative was to sit on the couch and let the injury define what I was capable of, and I had already decided after the coral snake twenty years earlier that I would not live that way.

The course was brutal. River crossings at altitude. Walls. Mud. My lungs burned in ways that reminded me the left one had been collapsed four months ago. My ribs ached through every obstacle that required me to brace or pull. At the monkey bars, I failed three times. Fell into the mud, climbed back up, fell again.

On the third attempt a stranger standing at the edge of the obstacle looked at me and said, "Come on man, you can do this." He did not know my history. He did not know about the bones or the helicopter or the hospital. He just saw a man struggling and said the thing that needed to be said.

I finished the monkey bars. We finished the rest of the course together. Had a beer at the end and never saw each other again.

I tell this story because the Body leg is not about looking good or hitting PRs or impressing anyone at the gym. The Body leg is about what your body allows you to do with your life. Four months after thirteen broken bones, my body allowed me to stand at a start line, endure a course designed to break healthy people, and finish alongside a stranger who became, for ninety minutes, exactly the accountability partner I needed.

The body is a vehicle. The question is not how it looks. The question is what it lets you do. When you train, when you eat to support your physiology, when you sleep eight or more hours, you are not optimizing a machine for vanity. You are building the capacity to show up for the moments that matter, including the ones you cannot predict.

The Tough Mudder was not the goal. The goal was proving to myself that the injury did not own me. The body was the tool that let me prove it.

What has your body allowed you to do that nothing else could?

~b