By Philip Hersh, Chicago Tribune reporter
6:53 p.m. CDT, September 15, 2012
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Before every cycling workout on the hilly, winding roads at Garden of the Gods, a recreational area with stunning orange rock formations just west of the city, Romas Bertulis gave the same plan to the athletes he coaches as head of USA Triathlon's elite development program.
Work the uphills hard, go easy on the downhills. Don't take risks.
The triathlete least likely to follow that advice was the most talented in the group, 2011 world junior champion Lukas Verzbicas, Bertulis' stepson. His plan was to go faster on each loop of the 5-kilometer circuit.
"It's just my mentality," Verzbicas said. "I have to finish strong."
He was using the workout as he did every other. It was a chance to show once again he was the best, a chance to dominate training partners in a way Bertulis believes borders on disrespect. Verzbicas knew it wasn't right to have that attitude in practice, that he should have saved it for races, but he loved the feeling of winning every day.
Verzbicas had come back to Colorado Springs after a series of professional triathlon races in Europe.
In one, June 17 at Banyoles, Spain, he finished first, beating Frenchman Laurent Vidal, who would go on to finish fifth in the Olympics. In another, July 14 in Tiszaujvaros, Hungary, he was sixth. In early June, Verzbicas had beaten 2012 U.S. Olympian Manny Huerta to win the Pan American Cup race in Dallas.
Now it was July 31. Verzbicas had more than a month before his next race.
By the time Verzbicas reached the sixth and final loop, he and Ryan Bice had broken away from the other two triathletes in that day's training group, Kevin McDowell and Erin Jones. Verzbicas, nearer the edge of the road, was slightly ahead as he and Bice began a 300-yard descent with a grade reaching 6.5 percent before a 90-degree left turn. Bertulis was following in a car.
Verzbicas was on a road bike rather than a triathlon bike, which is harder to control. He was going between 25 and 30 mph when he tried to brake for the turn. The bike hit some wet sand he had not noticed the previous five times around. The brakes did not hold. He began skidding out of control.
"I heard, 'Boom, boom,' '' Bertulis said.
The first sound was Verzbicas' bike slamming into the guardrail. The second was Verzbicas' head and shoulder slamming into the fence above the guardrail after the impact had sent him flying over the handlebars.
"It was one of the scariest things I've ever seen," Bice said.
Verzbicas wound up on his back. He tried vainly to get up. He struggled to breathe. He knew this was a lot more serious than his two other bike crashes in the previous year. He asked for an ambulance.
Bertulis had reached the scene. He gave his phone to Bice, who called for help.
"I think," Bertulis would say a month later, sitting in Verzbicas' room on Penrose-St. Francis Hospital'srehabilitation floor, "God just said, 'Slow down.' ''
Maybe there had been an element of hubris in this, of challenging a higher power by pushing the limits with an overweening confidence. Isn't that what elite athletes must do at times, show a defiance that often can make the difference between good and great?
But all such philosophical debate quickly was subsumed by physical reality. The spine injuries Verzbicas sustained did more than slow him down. They threatened his ability to walk again. They brought his promising sports career to a full stop, and no one can say for sure what competitive level Verzbicas might regain.
"From the standpoint of weekend warrior kind of stuff, I think he is going to get back to a fairly normal life," said Glen House, medical director of the Penrose Center for Neuro and Trauma Rehabilitation.
"I don't know beyond that, but Lukas has surprised me every day. I would not count him out for anything."
Verzbicas was released from the hospital five weeks after the accident and 12 days before the scheduled release date. That was a measure of how much faster than expected he had regained stability in basic movements like standing and walking. The competitiveness that had made Verzbicas the best prep distance runner in the country at Sandburg High School and a successful international triathlete now will be critical to his rehabilitation.
"I never thought he was going to walk," said trauma surgeon Roger Nagy, who has monitored Verzbicas' case. "Early on, we were even talking about a wheelchair or at least walking with bracing or crutches. The unbelievable heart this kid has is the reason he has exceeded all those thoughts."
For inspiration, Bertulis hung from the hospital TV set the green spikes Verzbicas had used in June 2011 to become the fifth high school runner under four minutes in the mile and the black-and-orange spikes he had used a week later to set a national high school record in the 2-mile. The largest message on the white board in his hospital room said "Rio 2016."
In one week, he went from being unable to move his right leg to taking five or six steps to walking, with assistance, the length of a hospital corridor. He will wear a cervical collar and the upper-body brace he puts on while walking around or doing rehab for another three weeks.
"I'll definitely be competing again by the end of 2013, at the latest," Verzbicas said before leaving the hospital.
On Thursday, he sent a text message with a new timeline.
"By the rate of recovery, I'm actually planning to compete at a world-class level sooner than end of '13 — more like by next summer," he wrote.
* * *
A day after the accident, Verzbicas underwent a seven-hour surgery. It repaired a burst fracture of the sixth thoracic vertebrae, and it straightened and stabilized his spinal column and cord with the insertion of stainless steel Harrington rods. MRI scans showed the crash had bent the spinal cord some 20 degrees starting at T-6. Fragments from the fracture impacted the nerve fibers in the spinal cord.
"It was a severe spine fracture," Nagy said. "The most concerning things were the neuro deficits."
For several days, Verzbicas had inconsistent movement in his left leg and could not move his right leg below the hip.
"I was in very bad shape emotionally," he said.
That was the time of his worst anxiety, the time of beginning to think his career might be over, the time he relied most on support from his family, friends and the hospital staff. Lance Armstrong and Javier Gomez of Spain, triathlon silver medalist at the London Olympics, were among the athletes who sent messages that buoyed his spirits.
Another surgery was scheduled Aug. 7 to fix the right collarbone, broken in three places. That had to be postponed a day because Verzbicas had developed hydrothorax, an accumulation of fluid in the lung cavity. A chest tube was inserted to drain the fluid.
About 30 minutes before the operation that put screws into the clavicle, Verzbicas suddenly realized he could move his right leg again. That was all the encouragement he needed.
"I had a choice of being depressed or saying this could have been a lot worse," Verzbicas said. "I could have broken my spinal cord. Here I was, still alive and moving, and they said they could fix me."
Within 10 days of the accident, Verzbicas had posted video of his first attempts to walk. A couple of weeks later, just after removal of a urinary catheter, he walked nearly a mile outdoors with Bertulis at his side.
Nonetheless, his mother, Rasa Verzbickiene, said, "There is a lot of work ahead."
Verzbicas' legs are sticks, shrunken by a lack of desire to eat that stripped 20 pounds from what had been a spindly 6-foot, 130-pound body and by loss of muscle mass from inactivity. He will begin working with a U.S. Olympic Committee dietitian.
For the immediate future, Verzbicas will continue outpatient neurological rehabilitation at the hospital while beginning physical rehab at the Olympic Training Center, where he lives. On Monday, he posted video of his workout on an AlterG anti-gravity treadmill, which allows for partial weight-bearing exercise.
"Once we can regain his motor control through neuromuscular retraining, then we can strengthen him and give him endurance it will take to get back into the sport," said Dustin Nabhan, the USOC's manager of multidisciplinary clinical care.
"What will help Lukas get through this is one of strongest competitive fires of anyone here. He wants to do so much and wants to get better so fast."
The injury at first led Verzbicas to a period of second-guessing his decision to leave a running career at the University of Oregon last November and concentrate on the triathlon. Even if he still needs significant improvement to compete consistently well against the best triathletes in the world, his early results as a professional were evidence that he had not made a foolish choice.
"Everyone told us he was crazy," Bertulis said.
The family — Bertulis, Verzbickiene and their 6-year-old son, Nojus — had left Orland Hills for Colorado Springs after Bertulis got the USA Triathlon job in the spring of 2011. Verzbicas finished high school and did what he thought was a final triathlon last September, making good on a pledge to win the junior worlds in honor of Geneva's McDowell, who had just finished chemotherapy for lymphatic cancer.
McDowell returned to competition this spring. He was lapped — and thereby out of the race — in the bike leg of Saturday's USA Triathlon national championship in Buffalo, N.Y., an event that had been on Verzbicas' schedule.
"One year ago, I was down and he was on a high," McDowell said. "I know Lukas will be back too."
Once other top triathletes realized Verzbicas was a threat, they took advantage of his relatively frail body in the one place that is possible, the swim leg. Verzbicas was unable to hold his position amid the pushing.
"My plan for the rest of the year was to work on strength," he said, adding with an ironic tone, "I'm kind of doing that now."
No matter how strong he is, there is no way to tell what Verzbicas will feel once he returns to riding a bike. The triathlon academy athletes shunned the Garden of the Gods loop for more than a month after July 31.
"It might be weird being with Lukas on a bike again," Bice said. "The last thing I remember is him flying off it. That will be hard to forget at first."
Verzbickiene, 50, is not frightened by the idea of having her son back on a bike, even if she said with a laugh, "We need to put him on a bike in water." She is pushing him to do more and work harder in rehab than even the therapists might demand.
"I am not only a mother, I am an athlete," said Verzbickiene, a former Lithuanian record-holder at 3,000 meters. "I am an athlete for many years. My mind is different. My athlete side is more than my mother side.
"This is a very painful lesson for him. But he will be stronger."
"Better," Bertulis said.
"A better person," Verzbickiene added.
A bit reluctantly, Verzbicas admits he habitually took too much risk. Then he blames himself for being unable to make a split-second decision to throw his bike to the left so he would have hit the road and not the guardrail, figuring that would have given him just a lot of road rash instead of a broken back. Perhaps a more experienced cyclist would have done that. Perhaps.
This was, of course, an accident. Whether Lukas Verzbicas' competitive personality made it an accident waiting to happen is something with which he will have to come to grips fully.
"The way I get to where I need to be is taking all these risks and not thinking about what could happen, just going at it," he said. "If it wasn't for that, I don't think I would have achieved what I have.
"I could have been more careful. Maybe now that's the lesson here. Who knows?"