BUENA VISTA — When Tom White attaches what looks like a scythe onto his “stump,” it’s almost like traveling backward in time, to when he was 21 and one of the nation’s top young runners.
On a recent, glorious afternoon, White took off along a dirt trail beside the Arkansas River in Buena Vista, his stride strong and graceful, the scythe — a prosthetic leg — pounding the undulating path in harmony with his other leg that is capped with a sneaker.
To a reporter running beside him, gasping, White grinned and said, “Hey, running at 8,000 feet isn’t easy.” The reporter thought, “What about running on a scythe?”
White, 49, had invested much of his youth in the pursuit of running. He grew up in New Mexico, where he was the state champion before heading to Adams State College in Alamosa, a perennial cross country powerhouse. There, he made All-America five times. Two years, the team won the national championship.
When he was 21, however, and still in college, a drunken driver in Rifle swerved into White, who was riding a motorcycle. The accident tore off his left foot.
Surgeons reattached it. He was in the hospital for 100 days. He got around on crutches for two years. Running, he thought, was history.
But more than 25 years later, White, a physician, arrived upon a simple but dramatic solution to his medical — and in his case, spiritual — condition.
First, though, he persevered.
He became a serious cyclist, riding for the Turin Bicycles team and racing for the Olympic trials. Meanwhile, his wife, Tammy, took up running while White was in medical school in California. One day, after Tammy had finished a marathon, White said: “Let’s run to the car.”
It was the first time he had run since the accident.
The next morning he ran around the block.
Slowly, he increased his distances and speeds, until he could join Tammy on her runs. One of the races was a 50-miler around Buena Vista. It was during that race that the couple decided to move to the town of about 2,200, a village surrounded by mountains, with the soaring Collegiate Peaks looming over the town’s western flank.
Throughout what he calls his “second running career,” he wrestled with constant pain and a taxing, disjointed gait. About three years ago, during a marathon in Italy, the sharp throbs that exploded through his body with every footfall finally put an end to his unlikely return to running.
But not long after the Italy episode, White discovered a way to hit the trails again.
“One day I was sitting here reading Running World magazine and there was an article about Amy Palmiero-Winters,” said White, a trim, tanned guy, sitting at the kitchen table in his tidy house. At this point, White left the table, then returned with a signed photograph of Palmiero-Winters, a runner who had her leg amputated and a prosthetic attached so she could keep running after being in a motorcycle accident.
“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” he said. “I showed Tammy; I said, ‘That’s what I want, right there.’ That night I told her, ‘I’m going to amputate my leg.’ ”
A month later, the leg from the knee down was gone.
For the family
The medical term for what is left is “residual limb.” But White calls it a stump.
The stump is not a touchy subject within the family. They named one of their dogs, a Norwich terrier, Jack, after Johnny Depp’s character in the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean.” White knows a guy in town who wears an eye patch, and jokes about teaming up with him next Halloween. They will say “Arrrr” a lot.
During the holidays the family baked gingerbread-men cookies. His daughters, Whitney, 10, and Jasmine, 6, would bite off one leg of each gingerbread man, calling them “Daddy cookies.”
Whitney said she’s in favor of her dad’s artificial leg because “he can play with us more and do more things.”
“I wasn’t scared,” she said. “I knew he would be happier and it would be better.”
Said Jasmine: “He can run and he walks me to my school and he takes care of us and that’s all.”
This, said White, is why he removed his leg. He did it for his family. He did it, in part, so he could walk the mile with the kids and Tammy to school every morning, a stroll past Victorian homes and through Buena Vista’s vest-pocket downtown, with its antique shops and cafes and its wandering herds of deer.
“As important as education is to us, so are health habits. Like walking to school. If we have a calling, it’s getting out the word about fitness,” said White, who along with Tammy coaches the Buena Vista High School girls cross country team. “That was a huge part of it. With my disability, I was going to be sentenced to the couch.”
As White made mashed potatoes, meatloaf and vegetables in the kitchen one evening, Tammy sat on a couch leafing through a magazine dedicated to the sport of ultra-running. Tammy, 46, a physical therapist, has run about a marathon a month for the past 10 years. Every year, too, she completes a 50-mile race.
“We stopped being able to do our thing together,” she said as Tom cooked. “I was mourning the loss of our time together. We would get a babysitter and take off on the trails for hours. We had lost it.”
When Tom revealed his plan to her — “Hey, honey, guess what? I’m going to cut off my leg” — Tammy said her response was “Yeah!”
“All night long I was planning all of the things we could do again,” she said.
A year after White’s leg was removed, he ran in the New York City Marathon. Just a few months ago, he ran a half-marathon, in Ireland. He plans to run many more.
At first, he was uncomfortable displaying his stump — “I thought, ‘My God, no woman will find me attractive. It’s gross’ ” — but he’s over it. The most difficult things to deal with, he said, are swimming pools and going to the bathroom at night. To swim, he removes his prosthetic and then crawls to the edge of the pool and flops in the water. When he has to get up in the middle of the night, he crawls to the bathroom.
“That’s my project in humility every night, crawling to the bathroom,” he said.
White considers these minor complaints. “I don’t have a moment of regret or sorrow or even wish that it hadn’t happened,” he said. “If somebody let me go back in time, I wouldn’t stop the accident. There is no way I would chance the risk of changing my life.”
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, an incorrect location was given for Adams State College. The college is in Alamosa.
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