My name is Michael Vitez, and I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning staff writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer and author of a new book about a triathlete, titled
The Road Back. It's a great and inspiring book. Brad Culp, editor of Lava Magazine, started it when he boarded a red-eye flight in Los Angeles, hoping it would put him to sleep, and finished as he arrived in New York. "What an amazing story," he wrote. "I couldn't put it down." He reviewed it in the August issue. I'm just spreading the word among people who I think would love the story.
Matt Miller, 20, a University of Virginia student and member of the college triathlon club, had just pedaled up a mountain pass. He was on top of the world in so many ways, in love, with dreams of attending medical school, so fit his resting pulse was 42! And then, cycling along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia, relaxed and happy after completing the most difficult part of his 85-mile ride, he rolled off the crown of the road on to the shoulder, overcompensated, and swerved across the double yellow line falling face-first into the path of an oncoming Porsche. He broke every bone in his face, suffered extensive brain injury, and stopped breathing. The real story is not what happened, but what happened after. The first car on the scene happened to be driven by an anesthesiologist, out for a foliage tour with his wife, and the best person in the world to open an airway and get someone breathing again. Matt wakes from a coma and his first question, scrawled with his broken hand, honestly, is "Can I go to physics lab?" Matt continued to recover in the most astonishing ways -- within two years of the accident, Matt was accepted into the University of Pennsylvania medical school, and as a first year medical student competed in the Ironman in Cozumel, finishing in 10:30!!
