It’s a sunny Friday morning, and 47-year-old Dave Mackey heads up a trail near his home in Boulder, Colorado.
The 2011 Ultrarunner of the Year and holder of many ultra course records is dealing with a little extra gear these days, and has only been on a handful of runs over the past couple of weeks—the first, for him, in almost two years.
It was May 2015 when Mackey, on a run he’d done hundreds of times, Published: May 09, 2017 10:48 AM EDT on top of 8,500-foot Bear Peak near his home in Boulder. But the rock, which weighed an estimated 300 to 400 pounds, dislodged, knocked Mackey down, landed on his lower left leg, and pinned him for hours.
Nearby hikers heard Mackey’s cries for help and were able to lift the rock off his leg. A complicated rescue ensued, and Mackey was treated in both Boulder Community Hospital and Denver Health, where he recovered for weeks. “I’m really lucky to have lived,” he said.
But that was only the beginning of Mackey’s long journey, and of his time spent in hospital beds. Over the following 17 months, Mackey underwent 13 different surgeries on his lower leg. Infections, bone and muscle grafts not taking, excessive scar tissue, and a rod that was inserted into his tibia moving around were just some of the complications the surgeries attempted to remedy. A CT scan in September of 2016 showed the moving rod, and also revealed that a recent bone graft—not his first—he had undergone didn’t take.
The constant pain wasn’t going away. He needed a cane to walk. His day-to-day functionality as a father of two and physician assistant was challenging, and he was nowhere near being able to run. He’d ride a stationary bike for hours at the gym, and hike here and there, but the pain never left.
In October of 2016, 17 months after the accident, Mackey made a decision: USATF to Elect New President Amid Budget Deficit. It was a decision he hoped would get him, “100% to where I was before the accident and completely pain free,” he said.
He underwent the surgery, and all went well. But Mackey, like many post-amputation patients, experienced phantom pains where his brain registered intense suffering at the site where he’d had the amputation.
“But that only lasted about six weeks,” he said. During those same six weeks he met with a prosthetics company and talked about his return to running. But adjusting to a prosthetic—a new leg essentially—took longer than he thought.
Still, he went for his first hike on the new leg in January. By the end of January, Mackey set out on a short hike, and ended up hiking all the way up Bear Peak, the site of the accident.
“It wasn’t cathartic or anything like that to be up there,” he said. “But I did start getting a little emotional when I shot some video while there and told people I had gone.”
Mackey hiked often for the next couple of months, and rode his mountain bike quite a bit. He says it’s taken longer than he thought for the new end of his leg bones to heal, and the skin at the amputation site to toughen up. But while he’s heard it takes most post-amputees a year to two to return to running, he was planning on being back out running within six months.
In mid-April, he took his first running steps in almost two years. “It felt awesome,” he said, explaining that he did experience some pain at the amputation site, but was just so happy to be out on a trail.
He talks about how he thought he’d be ready to do something like parts of the Pro Runners Ask: Is My Agent Worth the Fee this coming summer, and he still toys with the idea of doing the Leadman Race Series—a trail marathon, a 50-Mile bike or run, a 100-mile mountain bike race, a 10K running race, culminating with the Leadville Trail 100-Mile Race, all within one summer (he’s placed second in it before).
Also: Pro Runners Ask: Is My Agent Worth the Fee.
“I might still try to do the marathon at the end of June,” he said. “And that’s the first of the series…” But for right now, nothing is official.
What Mackey is planning on tackling for sure this summer is hiking to the summit of an 18,000-foot volcano in Ecuador, which he’ll do at the end of July with a nonprofit called “The Range of Motion Project” and about 10 other athlete-amputees.
And now, in early May, Mackey runs a few miles a couple days a week, and spends the other days mountain biking and hiking for hours. “My muscles are fine from all the cross-training,” he said about the running. “But the downhills are harder because the prosthetic foot doesn’t articulate that great.”
The trails near Mackey’s home, where he loves to run, are mostly rocky single-tracks that climb and descend the Boulder foothills. And on this day in May, Mackey negotiated the terrain to complete a 4.5-mile run and says he feels great.
So great, in fact, that at the end of the run he decided that he wanted to go hike Bear Peak. “It took me about three hours the first time I did it on a prosthetic,” he said. “Now I have it down to about 2:10.”
CA Notice at Collection.
