Paralyzed Racer On a Roll : Marathon: Wheelchair athlete seeks personal best in San Diego.

The brief exchange by sibling rivals is broken up by a sweet kiss to the cheek of sister DeAnna Sodoma. Moments earlier, brother John Batchie, whose 501 Levis and military-style boots make him look like an refugee from MTV, sat at the kitchen table and listened to DeAnna discuss her upcoming marathon.

“It’s going to be on TV,” said DeAnna, dressed casually in flowered leggings and a long-sleeved gray T-shirt. “I just hope they show a lot of the wheelchair races.”

John takes a good-natured jab: “You always want prime time, dude.”

“Not prime time, just equal time,” DeAnna counters.

Sodoma, 23, will be shooting for her best time when she competes in the San Diego Marathon, beginning at 7 a.m. Sunday in Oceanside. In less than six months of wheelchair racing, an endeavor she undertook after being paralyzed two years ago by a spinal condition, the Escondido resident has won all but three of the 21 races she has entered. The most recent triumph was a half marathon in Oita, Japan, the largest and most prestigious event of its kind.

Not only is Sodoma fast becoming a champion wheelchair racer, she is championing the cause of wheelchair racers everywhere, defending what she said is their right to be recognized in the same light as their running counterparts.

“I work just as hard as any other athlete,” said Sodoma, elated that her story will be told in the sports and not the lifestyle section of the newspaper. “I am an athlete.”

Her weekly workout regime--she swims three days, lifts weights four days and pushes or wheels 60-100 miles--supports that contention. She still is unsure whether she will race the half or full marathon, because her training was curtailed for three days by a bout of flu.

When the flu bug bit, she bit back harder, as is her style. She’s a Rocky on wheels with a will the size of Texas.

Japan may be light years away from Texas, but that was there Sodoma demonstrated the kind of iron will that can catapult athletes with a lot less talent to the top of their sport.

The night before she left San Diego for the October race, Sodoma suffered a cut on the outside area of her hand, the part used the most to push the wheels. The injury required five stitches.

Despite the pain, she was determined not only to compete, but to break into the top 10 of the women’s finishers.

“That was my goal,” she said. “I compared my best times to the top three or four seeds, and I didn’t think, realistically, I could do much better than that.”

Not knowing the strategy of the top woman, a racer from Denmark, Sodoma simply wanted to keep her in sight. But Sodoma turned out being the one looking over her shoulder.

“I started passing everyone into the first mile,” she said. “(The woman from Denmark) kept trying to whiz by me, but just kept working hard the whole race. I never let up.”

Her time of 1 hour, 30 seconds bettered the personal best she had clocked in August’s America’s Finest City Half Marathon by five minutes and beat the runner-up by one.

“My dad had never seen me race. He cried at the finish line,” Sodoma said.

Ken Sodoma, a Los Angeles County firefighter, made the trip at his daughter’s request.

“I was one proud papa,” he said. “She’s only been in a chair two years and hasn’t been racing that long. She just toughed it out and was able to do extremely well.”

According to Steve Meiche, Sodoma’s ex-boyfriend and current training partner, her success can be measured in direct proportion to her natural ability.

“She has the perfect road-rider’s frame,” Meiche said. “She has lots of natural talent and strength. It’s genetics. Some people have what it takes and can all the sudden pick it up.”

It is Sodoma’s hope to pick it up enough to earn herself a spot in the 1992 Paralympics in Barcelona, and eventually make a living as a professional racer.

“I believe she does have the potential to get to the top,” Ken said. “She’s always been real competitive.”

Sodoma had dabbled in competitive sports throughout high school but didn’t begin seriously training as a cyclist until she and Meiche began working out together in 1986.

But like her father, Sodoma was intent on becoming a firefighter first, and most of her energy was focused toward getting her certification. It would have taken her years, she realized, to reach a world-class level of elite racing.

“Those women at the top had been doing it five or six years longer than I had,” she said.

Still, she had a solid background on which to draw when she broke into the world of wheelchair racing.

“The concept’s the same,” Meiche said. “The speedwork, strength training, endurance, the drafting, the thing was to adapt it. I had never even seen a race itself, but from what she had seen, we tried to put it all together. There was a lot of trial and error. We’d go round and round about what she thought would work and what I thought would work.”

But the work itself never stops. And with enough of it, Sodoma believes the odds of her making some money and making it as a professional are good.

“Racing is the most important thing; I’m obsessed,” she said. “I don’t mind making the sacrifices it takes to be the best. I’m dedicating all my time, everything to this. I don’t want to let life pass me by, but it’s a thing you have to decide you’re going to do or not. It’s what I want, it makes me happy. Besides, I don’t know what else I’d be doing.”

Two years ago, her life was panning out in completely different directions.

She was a waitress by night, a college student by day, and had a relationship that centered around cycling training--with Meiche, a competitive cyclist who placed second in the men’s sprint race at nationals--crammed in between. She shared a two-story house near the beach with Meiche, where she ran with her dog, drove a Nissan 200SX and hung out with friends she sees very little these days.

It all melted like wax in March 1989, when she awoke one morning with numbness in her feet, a feeling she said spread quickly to her knees and eventually her stomach.

Four days later, she leafed through the yellow pages and found the name a neurologist, who recommended she undergo a series of tests.

She walked into Tri-City Hospital on March 9.

“It was so weird,” she recalled. “I begged the nurse that night to let me walk around, ‘cause I could just feel I was losing it.”

Doctors diagnosed her condition as transverse myelitis, but nobody is quite sure what caused her paralysis, or whether her condition is permanent.

Sodoma thinks the paralysis may have been the result of an accident in Long Beach a year earlier, when she was hit by a car while on her bicycle.

“I never felt quite right after that,” she said, suspecting a spinal injury. “My lower back hurt a lot.”

Sodoma went through the cycle of denial and depression she described as typical, but said she snapped out of it sooner than most.

“I accepted it a lot quicker than the average person,” she said. “I didn’t really feel sorry for myself. I believe that things happen for a reason.”

Said Ken Sodoma: “She dealt with it real well.”

What it did was force her to look inside and re-examine her priorities.

“You always hear people say, ‘You never know what you have until you lose it.’ That is such a strong statement,” she said. “I lost everything that was important to me--my house, my dog, my career, school, my car, surfing, running on the beach . . . But I survived. I’m a better person internally. I’m fulfilled with myself. It’s a real peaceful feeling.”

Sodoma said it’s not glamorous being in a chair, it is strictly a mode of transportation, but that she, at least, has known the joy of walking.

“What people forget is that I had 22 years of walking, running, skipping and jumping,” she said. “Some people never even get that. I’m consider myself lucky.”

What would make her even luckier is finding a coach to help her train. Two of the top women wheelchair racers along with the best coaches, are at the University of Illinois, Sodoma said. As long as she is in San Diego, her options are limited.

“It’s frustrating,” she said. “You can’t just buy a book. I’d love to find a coach.”

Sodoma is taking classes at Palomar College, and is studying to be an adaptive physical education teacher, in hopes of passing her active lifestyle on to others.

“Being in a chair, you’ll have so many more problems if you’re not physically fit,” she said. “It’s helped my life so much.”