From the Holland Sentinel | Sitting in a wheelchair next to his mother at Mary Free Bed, Jon Turner was at the lowest point in his recovery from the crash.
The Holland native who now lives in Grandville shifted his focus to the man who was learning how to walk again.
That man had fallen about three feet from a step stool and landed on his neck, while Turner had been involved in a car wreck so powerful it hurled the engine block 10 feet away.
Turner felt it should have been himself going through that struggle.
“There’s always somebody that has it worse,” he said. “Be happy for what you have, live your life, because you could be the guy that has it worse.”
And so Turner finally decided to stop putting off his dream of completing an Ironman triathlon.
Nearly three years after a car crash hospitalized himself and his wife Allison, who was driving when they swerved out of control into an oncoming car on an icy night, Turner will compete in the Florida Ironman.
The former sprinter at West Ottawa High School and Aquinas College is training for the Nov. 5 race in Panama City Beach, Fla. consisting of a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike and 26.2-mile run.
“The first time I saw (an Ironman triathlon), I was watching TV in eighth grade and a woman collapsed like 100 yards from the finish, and she crawled her way across the finish line, and I said, ‘That is awesome,’” said Turner, who is now 31 years old, as is his wife. “I want to do that. I want to push myself to that limit.”
But he’s not doing it simply to fulfill a childhood desire; he wants to raise money for The Hope Network, which rehabilitated Allison in Grand Rapids.
“They’re my heroes there,” Turner said. “They got my wife back. They got our life back.”
No more ‘next summer’
He has always wanted to do an Ironman, but he always seemed to put it off until “next summer,” he said.
The crash on Feb. 21, 2009 in Allison’s hometown, Greenville, gave both of them a heavy dose of perspective.
“The police officer … at the time, he said he’s been to 14 crashes that had fatalities, and he’s never been to a crash this bad where somebody survived,” Turner said. “That’s crazy.”
His injuries included a shattered clavicle, a crushed elbow, an open lower tibia fracture, torn knee cartilage and a torn tendon in his ankle. He had a six-hour surgery to have six plates and 36 screws put in to hold his bones together.
“For all my injuries, she was way worse than I was,” Turner said.
Allison suffered a broken ankle, wrist, pelvis, part of her C2 vertebrae, both orbital bones surrounding her eyes and a few ribs.
The injury of most concern, however, was to her head, he said.
“When the responders put her in the ambulance, they said ‘She’s not going to make it to the hospital,’” Turner recalled from a conversation with police. “They thought she was going to be dead on the way.”
Miraculous recovery
When Allison Turner answered the phone, she was out of breath.
She had just run five miles on “a bit of a hilly course” on a hot day this July, but nonetheless she went ahead with the interview.
Even in her best days as a distance runner, she said she couldn’t imagine doing what Jon is now attempting to accomplish.
When they both ran for Aquinas College, where they first met, she said she clumped him in with the other sprinters as being “a little bit lazy.”
“We’d come back from running 10 miles,” she said, “and we’re like, ‘Oh what’d you guys do today?’ ‘Oh, we ran 200 meters twice.’ ‘That was it?’”
“… I just can’t believe he’s going to run the marathon after swimming and biking. He’s a sprinter. He’s making me look bad.”
The fact that she’s even running in the first place is a credit in large part to The Hope Network.
Turner described her as being on the brink of death for a couple days after the car crash, hooked up to a ventilator and feeding tube.
She spent nearly two weeks in the trauma intensive care unit at Spectrum Hospital before she was released to Mary Free Bed for one month of rehabilitation. She then went to The Hope Network for three more months of rehab.
That’s where she got back on her feet after 3 1/2 months in a wheelchair.
“All I wanted to do was run on a treadmill because that’s my stress relief. I love running,” said Allison, who placed third at state in the 800 meters her senior year at Greenville High School.
“Every day I would say, ‘Please let me run on the treadmill,’ and every day they would say, ‘We can’t. You have a broken pelvis.’ Finally, they sunk a treadmill in the pool and let me run on it in the pool, which is pretty awesome.”
Jon said Allison is better off than he is. And he’s the one training for the Ironman.
“She has no pain, no really lasting effects,” he said. “She’s back to work full-time, and she’s doing great. So, I think I feel I owe The Hope Network something, and so this is what I’m trying to do.”
Lighting the fire
Just as Jon says Allison had it worse, Allison says, “He had worse injuries than I did.”
Jon required more than nine months before he could fully walk without a cane. As soon as he gained his unrestricted mobility back, he set the goal of finishing a half Ironman — which he did in Austin, Texas last October — and then if he made it through that, to train for the full as he is now.
During his rehabilitation, someone he described as “in the medical field” told him he wouldn’t be able to run or swim again. That’s all the bulletin board material he needed.
“They might have said it because they knew it might have got me fired up, but it didn’t sit well with me,” Turner said. “And I said, ‘Nope, I’m not giving up the lifestyle that I had before.’”
His advice to others?
“Hopefully,” Turner said, “it doesn’t take a really bad car accident and a near death experience to light the fire in your belly.”
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