A Mountain of Adversity

Lying on his back in the Sierra Nevada, bleeding from a two-inch hole in his head, Brian Harrison wasn’t asking for much.

“I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to spend the night on the side of this mountain,’ ” said Harrison, a freshman cross-country runner at UC Irvine.

That was June of 1998.

Stepping out his front door, taking newborn-deer steps on his first jog in four months, Harrison wasn’t expecting much.

“I just wanted to see if the legs still worked,” he said.

That was last October.

Running with the Irvine pack, preparing for the Stanford Invitational, Harrison wasn’t sure what to think.

“I was surprised I made the cut,” he said. “Surprised and happy.”

That was three weeks ago.

Time doesn’t fly, Harrison has found out. But life does move forward.

A year ago, he was a mess after tumbling 150 feet while backpacking in the mountains. Today, he is standing on his own two feet, and running.

“If you would have told me four months ago that Brian would be running with us, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Anteater Coach Vince O’Boyle said. “There was no way I could have predicted this. He got over some huge physical humps.”

Those leaps and bounds were evident in the first meet this season. Harrison ran the 8,000-meter course at the UC Irvine/Asics Invitational in 27 minutes 33.9 seconds, which is still his season best.

Harrison, who attended Agoura High School, isn’t going to win the Big West race next week. He is currently the Anteaters’ eighth runner--the top seven score in the conference meet. Still, that alone is a victory. He pushed himself all summer to get to this point, and it shows.

“You can’t break the guy’s pace,” Anteater runner Terry Nelson said. “We ran together in that first race and he just kept going.”

Harrison smiled about that, claiming it is a bit of an exaggeration.

“They break me quite often,” he said. “I’m just trying to keep up with the other guys and stay with them as long as I can.

“I didn’t know what level I was going to be at this year, but I wanted to compete. I love running and it was important to me. So last summer I started running every day again. No more stationary bikes or anything like that. I just went out and ran.”

It was quite a change from the previous summer.

Harrison vividly recalls the Fourth of July last year. His family and friends wheeled him up to the roof of a Van Nuys hospital so he could watch the fireworks.

“You could see two different shows,” Harrison said. “That was cool. Then they wheeled me back to my room.”

Five days earlier, he and three friends were backpacking north of Mt. Whitney, a trip they had planned to celebrate graduating from high school.

Harrison was hardly a tenderfoot. He and a friend had backpacked in that area the previous year. This time, though, they were unprepared for the elements when they came down a mountain at Baxter Pass.

“There was snow there. Who expects snow on June 29?” Harrison said. “We didn’t have spiked shoes and we had only one pick between the four of us.

“I slipped and started sliding on my bottom. I couldn’t dig in. I saw the snow was ending, so for some reason I thought if I stood up, it might help.”

The last thing Harrison remembers was falling face-first toward a rock. When he regained consciousness, his friends were bandaging his head.

“They were saying, ‘Don’t move, don’t move, you’re OK, you’re alive,’ ” Harrison said.

Harrison suffered a broken vertebra and had a hole in his skull. They were a two-day hike from civilization.

What saved him was technology.

“My friend had his cell phone,” Harrison said. “He went to the top of the mountain and called his parents. He said it took seven or eight tries before they understood what had happened. They called the Inyo County sheriff department.”

It was another four hours before he could be airlifted to Independence. From there, he was flown to Van Nuys and rushed into surgery.

The gash in his head was the immediate concern. The rock had pulverized his skull in an area the “size of a silver dollar,” Harrison said, and doctors were concerned about infection.

They also took a bone from his hip and placed it in his neck along with metal supports. Three months later, a plate was put over the hole in his head.

“It was a long, boring summer,” Harrison said. “They had me using a walker for a while, but that got to be a hassle dragging it around. I couldn’t run and that had me bouncing off the walls.”

Harrison has focused that energy this fall. He finished third in a dual meet against UC San Diego on Oct. 9.

“I think he is as tough as anybody I know,” said Mike Murray, one of the Anteaters’ top runners. “To come back from what he went through and compete at this level, I have a lot of respect for him.”

The first steps were wobbly. Harrison didn’t receive official clearance to run until January.

That didn’t stop him from a few unofficial outings. He ventured out late last October.

“The doctor said she couldn’t clear me, but if I had to run to catch a bus, I probably wouldn’t hurt myself too bad,” he said.

It didn’t take him long to find a bus stop.

“I figured I would do a 10-minute jog,” Harrison aid. “After the first couple steps, I started smiling. I could still do this.”

But not for nearly another year--competitively, at least.

The Irvine training room became his home--a body shop, really--last spring, and he logged hundreds of miles on the stationary bicycle. Harrison then spent the summer in a rigorous running program.

“He showed up the first day in terrific shape,” O’Boyle said. “He couldn’t run with any of our guys last spring, then he came back from the summer and was beating a lot of them. There is a lot of personal satisfaction in seeing a guy like Brian. He could have easily packed it in.”

That, Harrison said, was never an option.

“I look at people who are paraplegics a lot differently,” Harrison said. “I have a lot of respect for someone like Christopher Reeve. It’s scary to think how close I came and how fortunate I am.

“I couldn’t go another year without competing. I’m going to ride this as long as I can.”