Beset by illness, allergies and middle age, Doug Padilla has wondered for years whether he should continue his quest to become the world-class runner he once was, or get on with the rest of his life. Always he sought an answer, some inspiration, something to tell him what to do, but he kept trying to run. Then 10 days ago he was out on a training run when he was struck by a car and hurled into the middle of an intersection.
Some answer. He had been hoping for something subtler.Like an anvil falling on his head.
"The Lord speaks in a still small voice - unless it doesn't work," said Padilla from his bed, as his wife Lynette spoon fed him lunch.
Padilla, lucky to be alive, is recuperating at home after a five-day hospital stay. It will be a month before he can put weight on his mangled leg, which has been pieced together like a puzzle. It will be a year and a half before he can run again.
And yet Padilla, who would have been running in the Olympic trials instead of getting hit by a car that day if he had made the qualifying time, still isn't sure that it's time to give up running, even though he'll be 40 come October. He thinks he might try it again in a couple of years.
"This answers some questions, but it asks a few more," he says of the accident. "I just haven't felt like I was supposed to quit running. I feel an obligation to running. It opened doors to me that I wouldn't have had."
And then he tells you how running transformed him from a tiny, asthmatic kid with crooked feet who was the last one picked for pickup games into a two-time Olympic distance runner and four-minute miler. At class reunions he can feel the wonder of former classmates. How did he become an Olympian?
It isn't easy leaving a friend like running behind. That's why he was running again last week. Sure, he'd failed to make the Olympic trials, and he hadn't been nationally ranked since 1989, and he'd hardly even raced or trained for three years, but maybe he could whip himself into shape for next winter's indoor track season.
On the afternoon of June 19, he left his Orem house for a five-mile run. It was a route he'd run hundreds of times. About two miles later, he stopped at a busy intersection. While he was waiting for the light to change, a pickup truck stopped at the crosswalk next to him.
Padilla jogged into the crosswalk in front of the truck and never heard the screams of teenage girls who could see what was about to happen as they sat in their idling car. Padilla stepped past the truck and was struck by a car traveling about 40 miles per hour.
"The next thing I know I'm in the air, and then I'm trying to get myself up off the pavement," he recalls.
Padilla landed 70 feet from the point of impact. According to witnesses, he struck the windshield (hard enough to break it), cartwheeled over the top of the car and landed in the intersection. When onlookers arrived at Padilla's side, his face was so covered with blood that only his eyes were visible. A bone protruded from his lower left leg, which was twisted at a sickening angle, the foot pointing the wrong way.
It was supposed to be a one- or two-hour operation to repair the leg. It was five. Even after studying the X-rays, you're uncertain how many actual breaks there are in the fibula and tibia. There is a jumble of bones at odd angles. Clearly visible are 15 large screws and several plates that doctors used to reconstruct the leg.
Padilla also has a broken scapula and numerous abrasions on his shoulders, face and scalp, but it could have been worse. He could have been killed or crippled.
"There are no neck injuries, no back injuries, no head injuries, no internal injuries, no joint injuries," marvels Padilla. "The doctors couldn't believe it."
Padilla required two transfusions to replace the blood he lost in surgery, and he has had to endure pain, fatigue, stiffness and the side effects of painkillers. "I have a new appreciation for the saying, I feel like I've been hit by a truck," he says.
Since the accident, he has been overwhelmed by an outpouring of support and kindness, which isn't surprising if you know the guileless, sweet-tempered Padilla. (He's so considerate of others that he insisted on calling Lynette from the hospital personally to tell her he'd be a little late getting back from his run. He didn't want to worry her.) Padilla received so many visitors at the hospital that a sign was eventually posted on his door asking them to check with nurses first. The patient wasn't getting enough rest. The phone rang so often at the Padilla house that Lynette had to take it off the hook at times so her husband could sleep. Mail arrives in bunches from around the country.
"He's got lots of friends," says Lynette. "They love Doug."
So what's next for Padilla? He wonders as he lies in bed mending. He has no job and no health insurance, which could leave him saddled with huge medical bills. No citations were issued in the accident. Police say Padilla crossed against the light.
Then there is the matter of running.
The accident is only the latest in a series of setbacks for his once-promising running career. During the first few years of his post-collegiate career, he set numerous American records and placed seventh in the '84 Olympics. In 1985, he won the overall Grand Prix championship and ranked No. 2 in the world at 5,000 meters. He was only 28 years old. There was no reason to suspect that his career had crested, but it had, and in some ways Padilla was prepared for it.
"After 1985, I felt like some trial awaited me because things had gone so well," he says. "The Lord has a certain number of trials lined up for you."
Since then, Padilla has been hampered by allergies, mono, various infections, fatigue. He has never returned to form, although he did run well enough to make the '88 Olympic team.
Through it all, he has stubbornly held out hope of returning to the sport he loves. He has never taken a job, thinking that to do so would force him to retire. And yet he couldn't train.
"From 1992 to '95, I figured I was always a couple of weeks away from training again," he says. "I started training four times in that period and it never lasted more than two weeks."
In March of '95, Padilla finally considered his running career finished. He put away his training log, in which he had recorded every one of his workouts for more than a decade. But a few months later he started feeling good again, and he resumed training.
"I was thinking that if I made the Olympic team I could make some money," says Padilla, who has supported his wife and four children with savings left over from his running paydays. But the comeback didn't go well. He ran four races this spring and was lapped in three. His fastest time, 14:38, was 56 seconds short of qualifying for the Olympic trials.
Padilla still hopes to make money with his legs again when he is healed, but time is running against him no matter which way he turns, either as a 40-year-old looking for his first real job or restarting a running career. But for now, the decision has been made for him. There will be no running for a while. The accident has seen to that.
"It makes me want to cry," says Lynette, and it appears she might. "He loves running so much. I don't know what he's going to do."