No time for never: after a paralyzing auto accident, rising motocross racer Matt Bigos was told he'd never walk again. Yet his passion for competition—and fitness!—proved doctors more wrong than everyone imagined. Everyone except him

Men's Fitness, March, 2008 by Alyssa Roenigk

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Matt Bigos' triathlon career began as a joke among friends. The date was Nov. 12, 2006, and the former motocross racer had driven up to Panama City Beach, Fla., with a group of cycling buddies to watch the Ironman Florida. Years earlier, Bigos had been an avid runner. He had been interested in triathlons, but motocross races and training never allowed much time for other sports. Besides, he didn't quite see the point of trading a high-performance engine for a set of plastic pedals. But on that day, watching a triathlon in person rekindled his interest in the sport. "There was so much energy, so much respect between athletes," he recalls. "I'd never seen anything like it." Never.

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Simply watching the event wasn't enough. Bigos wanted to experience the race as a competitor. He wanted--no, needed--to feel the rush of adrenaline surging through his body at the sound of the starting gun. He needed to feel the pains and exhilaration of pushing his body through the grueling swim, run, and biking portions of the race. By the time the first competitors reached the finish line, Bigos' friends had picked up on his excitement. Knowing Matt was never one to back down from a challenge, they encouraged him to sign up when registration for the 2007 race opened the next morning.

"Do it," they told Matt. "You've got a year to train."

"Come on, Matty. It's now or never."

Matt Bigos knew the word "never" well. He never should have gotten in the car that night in 2003. That's what some of his friends had told him. Bigos had been in Maryland for a motocross race, working as a mechanic for Florida pro Paul Perebijnos. On the evening of June 10, the driver and his crew went out to eat with friends in Annapolis and were introduced to moto icon Travis Pastrana, who lived nearby. After dinner, Pastrana invited the guys back to his house and offered to take Bigos for a ride in his Corvette. "People say it was my own fault for getting in the car with him," Bigos says. "They say I deserved what happened."

Pastrana did not drink any alcohol that night, but while flying around the windy, hilly roads snaking through Davidsonville he lost control of his car, careened off the road, and crashed into an oak tree. The impact flipped the vehicle, blew apart the engine, and tossed Pastrana, who wasn't wearing a seat belt, to the pavement. He was treated for torn ligaments in his right thumb and released from the hospital the next day. Bigos, who was wearing a seat belt, was not so lucky. Trapped inside the vehicle, his legs crushed by the dashboard, he was sure he was going to die. Rescue workers used the jaws of life to free him from the car, and he was airlifted to nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he spent three weeks in ICU and another six weeks at an in-patient rehab center in Baltimore. By the time they'd assessed the damage to his athlete's body, doctors found that Bigos had shattered both of his shoulder blades, broken five ribs, and sustained a severe bruise to his spinal cord, which left him with no movement or feeling below his nipples.

Bigos suffered what is known as an incomplete spinal injury. His spinal cord was not irrevocably damaged, and signals to his brain were not completely disrupted. Yet Bigos' prognosis was grim. Never, the doctors said. They told him that he'd never walk again.

"Travis came to my room the day after the accident," Bigos says. "He looked at my morn and said he was sorry. Then he asked me if I hated him." Bigos thought about it. He'd known Pastrana only one day, and his life would never be the same as a result. He didn't know what his future held, but he was sure of at least one thing: It couldn't be filled with hate. "I said no," Bigos remembers. "I couldn't waste my time being angry."

"Get used to life in a chair," Bigos was told over and again. His response was not surprising: "Never. Not as long as there is a sliver of hope," he thought. "One way or another, I will get out of this chair," he told his therapist about a week into rehab. "I will not live in a chair." His father, Steve, an engineer at NASA, was standing in the room at the time. He grasped the meaning in his son's words: He would rather die than live his life in a wheelchair, he thought. "That was a terror moment," Steve says.

From that day, the desire to walk became more than a dream, more than an obsession for Bigos. "It was self-preservation" he says. "I wanted to live, and that meant walking." Six weeks after the accident and a few days before he was discharged from the hospital, Bigos had a breakthrough: He moved his big toe. "It was so exciting," his mother, Linda, recalls. That tiny movement was all the proof Matt and his family needed to believe that there was still life in his legs, that "never" was just a word.

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No time for never: after a paralyzing auto accident, rising motocross racer Matt Bigos was told he'd never walk again. Yet his passion for competition—and fitness!—proved doctors more wrong than everyone imagined. Everyone except him

Men's Fitness, March, 2008 by Alyssa Roenigk

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