COLORADO SPRINGS — Dave Denniston loves to make jokes about his disability. He’ll say he is 6-foot-3 when he is not 5-foot-1, which is when he’s sitting in his wheelchair.
He makes wisecracks about going prematurely bald. About the thumping noise his paralyzed legs make when they scrape the lane ropes in the swimming pool at the Olympic Training Center. Even the sledding accident in Wyoming that left him a paraplegic in 2005.
“Up until that point,” the former Olympic-caliber swimmer says with a goofy grin, “one of the best trips I’ve ever had.”
Denniston could be bitter, but he said his accident cured him of that tendency. Now he’s upbeat about a new goal: reaching the Paralympics in Beijing next summer as a breaststroker.
“I was a pretty negative, bitter person before my accident in a lot of ways,” said Denniston, who swam for Arapahoe High School and Auburn University, nearly making the Olympic team in 2004. “I had a bad habit of focusing on the negative things in my life.”
It took a broken back and a brush with death in the backcountry to straighten out the former NCAA breaststroke champion.
“When I was training for the Olympic team, my body was perfect, my attitude was paralyzed,” Denniston said before a recent workout at the OTC. “Now it’s switched around. My body may be paralyzed, but I’m much happier than I’ve ever been because of the way I’ve chosen to focus on all the positive things I have now.”
Denniston set Colorado prep records in the 200-meter individual medley and the 100-meter breaststroke. He helped Auburn win an NCAA team championship and was part of a relay that broke a world record in Moscow. He made a world championships team in 2003 and came within 1.31 seconds of making the 2004 Olympic team.
He thought his competitive career ended that day in 2004 at age 26. The following winter, having accepted a club coaching job in New Zealand that would keep him far from home for two or three years, Denniston called childhood friend Andy Miller to suggest a backcountry trip to the family cabin in Wyoming. On their second day of sledding, he lost control going headfirst.
“I hit a bump or something and it sent me off toward a grove of trees,” Denniston recalled. “I bailed off the sled and tried to stop, but it was just ice from where the shadow of the trees had been. I kept sliding right towards this tree, really fast, headfirst. I realized I was going to hit it and spun my body around, bam, right in the middle of my back.”
Miller rushed to his side, where he found Denniston coughing up blood. Denniston couldn’t feel his legs and wondered if he was dying.
Friend ran 2 miles for help
Miller ran 2 miles to a point where his cellphone would work so he could call for help. EMTs on snowmobiles arrived two hours later.
“I joke around about it now, but it was scary,” Denniston said. “It was the most scared I’ve ever been.”
While recuperating, he saw people in hospitals who were bitter and resentful, feeling sorry for themselves. He vowed to be different. He spent more than two years at Project Walk in Carlsbad, Calif., trying to make his legs work again. Now he lives in Longmont and rehabs at Boulder’s SCI Recovery Project, when he isn’t in the pool training for Beijing. His first competition comes Dec. 6-8 in College Park, Md.
He’s only been swimming seriously since August, but coaches believe he could be exceptional because most Paralympic swimmers have no previous background as elite competitors.
“I would anticipate from Dave’s background and the physiology of an elite athlete, with a little more time to get back into shape, that’s all going to come through,” said Julie O’Neill, head coach of the U.S. Paralympics Swimming national team.
Not that the transition has been easy. Not only do his paralyzed legs offer no propulsion, they droop behind him like an anchor.
“The legs get in this V-shape where the knees drop down and there’s nothing he can do to control that,” O’Neill said. “He’s got a little bit of extra drag.”
Working twice as hard
Denniston compares it to dragging a parachute, something he did training as an able-bodied swimmer to strengthen his arms. It takes him almost exactly twice as many arm strokes to cover a given distance in the pool.
“It’s twice as hard to go half as far,” Denniston said. “But it’s still fun. I’ve been having a lot of fun.”
Denniston also is working with USOC Paralympics coach Jimi Flowers, who recruited him to Auburn and coached him there.
“The fact that he doesn’t have his legs to propel him forward, he’s relying on a lot of lunging, timing and technique,” Flowers said. “Thank God we worked, when he was able-bodied, on technique.”
Denniston trains at the OTC in Colorado Springs with a half-dozen Paralympic hopefuls including Rudy Garcia-Tolson (double amputee above the knees) and Jarrett Perry (left leg amputee), both of whom won gold medals at the 2004 Paralympics in Athens. Denniston hopes his notoriety will bring more attention to them and Jessica Long, who won the 2007 Sullivan Award after winning nine gold medals and setting five world records at last year’s world championships.
“You hear all about Michael Phelps doing it, which is amazing, but who is Jessica Long?” Denniston said. “Hopefully I can be a little bit of a bridge and get some of these athletes that I train with every day a little more notoriety. They are phenomenal athletes, you just don’t hear about them very much.”
John Meyer: 303-954-1616 or jmeyer@denverpost.com
