Chapter 25: Bull Run

The Nissan GT-R does zero to sixty in 2.9 seconds.

I know this because I felt every fraction of every one of those seconds with my entire chest pressed back into a racing seat at Road Atlanta, Dawsonville, Georgia, November 24, 2012. Thanksgiving weekend. While normal people were digesting turkey and watching football, I was strapped into a thousand-horsepower Japanese missile doing 160 miles per hour on a racetrack.

Most thrilling day of my life. And I've had my neck broken, so the bar for "thrilling" is higher than most.

—

Here's what people don't understand about adrenaline when you're in my position: they think it should scare me. Like I've already had the worst thing happen, so I should be cautious. Measured. Careful.

The opposite is true.

The worst thing already happened. It happened in a swimming pool at 2:00 AM doing something as mundane as a cannonball. Not skydiving. Not racing. Not cliff jumping. A pool party. The universe already proved that danger doesn't care about your risk assessment. You can get destroyed doing nothing special.

So if the safe thing and the dangerous thing carry the same cosmic probability of disaster, why would I pick the boring one?

That's not recklessness talking. That's math.

—

The GT-R story starts with Nadia. She ran a PT/OT clinic, and somewhere along the way she became a friend who understood that physical therapy wasn't just about maintaining what I had—it was about testing what I could do. Nadia was the one who connected me with the track day crew, the kind of people who spend their weekends and their savings making cars go fast for no reason other than the primal satisfaction of speed.

I loved them immediately.

The day at Road Atlanta was a charity event—one of those setups where you donate money and someone lets you ride shotgun in a car that costs more than your house. Except the organizers took one look at me and said, "You want to ride in the GT-R?"

"I want to drive the GT-R."

Pause. Looks exchanged. The kind of looks that translate to: Can he even...?

"My hands work fine," I said. "And the car's an automatic. I just need someone to get me in the seat."

Two guys lifted me into the cockpit. Someone strapped the harness across my chest. Helmet on. The steering wheel was right there, fat and leather-wrapped and real. The engine was idling behind me, this low predatory rumble that you feel in your teeth.

The instructor got in the passenger seat. He looked at my hands on the wheel, looked at my legs—which weren't going to be doing anything—and looked at the hand controls that had been rigged up for adaptive driving.

"You sure about this?" he said.

I was sure about this before I was born.

I pushed the accelerator. The GT-R didn't move so much as launch. The g-force hit my chest like a wall. The world turned into streaks. The engine screamed. The tires screamed. I might have screamed—I honestly don't know, because the only thing I could process was the sheer velocity of being alive.

Turn one. Turn two. The instructor talking in my ear—"Brake here, gas there, watch the apex"—and me doing some of it and ignoring the rest because my body was vibrating at a frequency I hadn't felt since before the accident. Not the vibration of a wheelchair on rough pavement. Not the buzz of a hospital bed adjusting. The vibration of power. Of control. Of physics bending around my decisions.

I did four laps. Four laps of someone else's car on someone else's track, and I felt more like myself than I had in three years.

When they pulled me out of the car, I was shaking. Not from fear. From the chemical aftermath of pure, stupid, beautiful joy.

—

That track day cracked something open. A door I'd been circling since the accident but hadn't walked through.

See, early on—in the hospital, in rehab, in the first year of figuring out what this new life was going to look like—I'd made a quiet deal with myself. The deal was: survive. Get stable. Don't die. Don't complain. Learn the chair. Learn the van. Learn the transfers. Learn to exist in this body and be grateful for what's left.

And I did all of that. I was a good patient. A great patient, actually. The nurses at Shepherd Center said I was the most positive guy on the floor, and I wasn't faking it. Not entirely.

But surviving isn't living. And I didn't break my neck to spend the next fifty years just surviving.

The GT-R showed me what living felt like. And once you remember what it feels like, you can't go back to pretending you don't want it.

—

February 22, 2011. A year and a half before the track day, but foundational. The moment that changed the equation.

I stood up.

Not the way you stand up. Not legs and muscles and the automatic ballet of bipedal movement that you don't even think about. I stood up in a standing wheelchair—a mechanical frame that locks your legs straight and tilts you vertical. The kind of standing that takes twenty minutes of setup and two people to spot you and doesn't involve a single muscle below your injury line firing.

But I stood up.

Five foot ten. Not three foot eleven. Not eye-level with belt buckles and tabletops and the middle shelf at the grocery store. Standing. Looking people in the eye. Seeing the world from the height I used to take for granted.

"I'm not 3'11" anymore!" I wrote that night. Exclamation point and everything.

You know what's funny? People talk about the view from mountaintops and rooftops and skyscrapers. The best view I ever had was from five foot ten, in a medical device, in a physical therapy room with fluorescent lighting and beige carpet. Because that view came with a promise: the chair does not define the limits. I do.

—

June 2013. BullRun.

If the GT-R was the gateway drug, BullRun was the full commitment. BullRun is a cross-country rally—think Cannonball Run, the movie, except real and legal. Sort of. A convoy of exotic cars driving from one coast to the other, party to party, city to city, with the kind of people who own Lamborghinis and have questionable judgment.

My people.

I drove from Atlanta to the finish line. My truck—hand controls, wheelchair lift in the back, nothing exotic about it—rolling alongside Ferraris and McLarens and Porsches. And you know what? Nobody cared. Nobody looked at my truck and said "you don't belong here." The BullRun ethos is simple: if you love speed and you can keep up, you're in.

I kept up.

The nights were hotels and parking lots and strangers becoming friends over gas station coffee at midnight. The days were long stretches of highway where the only thing that mattered was the next mile. I'd roll into a checkpoint and guys driving half-million-dollar cars would walk over to bullshit. Not because I was in a wheelchair. Because I was a driver.

That distinction matters. In the GT-R, I was a driver. On BullRun, I was a driver. Not a charity case. Not an inspiration. A participant. An equal member of a community that judged you by your RPMs, not your medical records.

I went back in 2014. Second year. Cross-country again. By then I knew the rhythm—the adrenaline of the start, the companionship of the road, the bone-deep satisfaction of pulling into the final checkpoint and knowing you did it. You covered the miles. You kept up.

—

October 1, 2011. I got on a horse.

His name was Buckwheat, and he wanted nothing to do with me. The feeling was mutual, briefly—I'm from bases and suburbs, not ranches. But someone had set up an adaptive riding program, and someone else had decided I should try it, and at some point in the conversation I'd said yes because saying no had stopped being an option I was interested in.

Getting on a horse when you can't grip with your legs is an engineering problem. They solved it with straps and a mounting platform and two volunteers on either side who looked significantly more nervous than I did. Buckwheat stood still, which was either patience or contempt—with horses, it's hard to tell.

Then we moved. And the world changed angle. Up high. Moving. The rhythm of the horse's gait swaying my body in a way that felt almost natural, almost like walking, almost like the kinetic memory of motion that my spine hadn't forgotten even if it couldn't execute.

"Standing up to Buckwheat," I called it later. A bad joke. But the experience wasn't a joke. It was data. More evidence for the case I was building: this body is limited. But limited is not the same as over.

—

There's a thread connecting all of these moments—the GT-R, the standing wheelchair, BullRun, Buckwheat—and it's not adrenaline. Not really. Adrenaline is the byproduct. The actual thread is this:

Refusal.

Refusal to accept the version of my life that the accident prescribed. The version where I'm careful and grateful and quiet. Where I stay home because home is safe. Where I avoid risk because I've already been burned. Where I let the chair be the period at the end of the sentence.

The chair is not a period. It's a comma.

I'm not done.

Every lap at Road Atlanta. Every mile on BullRun. Every second vertical in that standing frame. Every bounce on Buckwheat's back. Every single moment where someone looked at me and thought can he? and I answered by already doing it—those aren't stunts. They're not inspiration porn. They're not a guy overcoming his disability.

They're just a guy living his life at the volume he always lived it. The accident didn't make me cautious. It made me more specific about what risks are worth taking. A pool at 2:00 AM with no lights and no thought? Bad risk. A GT-R at 160 on a professional track with safety equipment and an instructor? Good risk. A cross-country rally with a community of lunatics who love the same thing you love? That's not even a risk. That's just Tuesday.

—

There's one more moment. Small. Nobody was there to photograph it or post about it.

Sometime in 2013—I don't remember the exact date, which tells you how little fanfare there was—I was in the parking lot of a grocery store. I'd just finished loading my bags into the truck. The van, technically. The big blue thing with the wheelchair lift and the hand controls and all the equipment that turns a simple grocery run into a logistics operation.

I'd gotten the bags in. Done the transfer from chair to seat. Stowed the chair. Started the engine.

And I just sat there for a second.

The radio was playing something—probably country, it was Louisiana—and the A/C was blowing, and the parking lot was just a parking lot. Nothing special. Nobody watching.

And I thought: I went to the store. By myself. And I'm going home. By myself. And nobody helped me do any of it.

That's the version of adrenaline nobody talks about. Not the GT-R kind. Not the BullRun kind. The kind where the most ordinary moment in the world—a guy sitting in his car after buying groceries—becomes the most extraordinary proof that you are still here, still capable, still moving through the world on your own terms.

The big moments make the stories. The track days and the rallies and the standing wheelchair and the horseback riding—those are the chapters people want to hear.

But the parking lot is where you actually win.

The parking lot, and a thousand moments like it, are where the chair stops being a cage and starts being what it always should have been:

A vehicle.

---

The second BullRun, 2014, was different from the first. Not because the route changed or the cars got faster. Because I wasn't trying to prove anything anymore.

The first year, there was still something to prove. To myself, mostly. I was the guy with the hand controls and the wheelchair lift rolling alongside Ferraris. There was a part of me listening for the other shoe — waiting for someone to say, nicely, that this wasn't really meant for people like me. Nobody ever did. But I was listening anyway.

Second year, I just drove. I enjoyed the convoy, the checkpoints, the midnight gas station conversations. I let the miles be miles instead of evidence. That's a different kind of freedom than the first year's. Harder to earn. Better when you get there.

There were guys on BullRun who knew my story. The chair, the pool, the whole thing. Not because I'd told them — because a couple of them had looked me up after year one. One of them, a guy from Atlanta who drove a Porsche and had the last name of a bank, pulled me aside at a checkpoint in Nashville.

"I've been thinking about your story," he said.

I braced for the inspiration speech. I've gotten good at bracing.

"You should do something longer next year. Maybe international."

Not "you're so brave." Not "I don't know how you do it." Just: you should do more. The assumption was I could.

That's the whole thing, right there. Not pity. Not awe. Just a guy who assumed I was capable and thought I should aim bigger.

I'm still thinking about the international route.

---

I think about risk a lot. More than most people, probably, because most people haven't had their body prove to them in one second that everything can change. Most people live in the theoretical space of "something could happen." I live in the proven space of "something did happen."

And here's what that clarity gives you: permission.

Not permission to be stupid. I'm not jumping off buildings or playing in traffic. But permission to stop calculating the odds on everything. Permission to say yes before your brain finishes the risk assessment. Permission to trust the math that says danger is random and caution is mostly theater.

My buddy Lee Patterson—the designated driver the night of the accident, sober as a judge, doing everything right—he was right there when my world ended. He did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong, really, other than jumping into a pool without checking the depth. The universe doesn't grade on preparedness. It just happens.

So when someone says, "Aren't you scared?" when I'm strapped into a race car or signing up for a cross-country rally or getting lifted onto a horse named Buckwheat who clearly has opinions about the situation—the answer is: of course I'm scared. Fear is information. I'm not trying to eliminate it. I'm trying to stop letting it make my decisions.

There's a difference between a life without fear and a life that isn't governed by it. I'll take door number two.

The standing wheelchair. The GT-R. BullRun. Buckwheat. The handcycle I tried once and hated because my shoulders aren't built for it but I finished the course anyway. The all-terrain wheelchair at the Louisiana state parks, tearing through trails that weren't designed for anything with wheels. Every single one of these was a negotiation between what my body can't do and what I refuse not to do.

And every single one ended the same way: with me back in the chair, tired, sore, sometimes bleeding from a transfer gone wrong, and more alive than I was that morning.

That's the trade. That's always been the trade.

You give the world your comfort. The world gives you back your life.

I'll make that deal every time.