Taylor Turned to Swimming so Life Wouldn’t Sink Him

First, Mike Taylor noticed he had a slight limp in his left leg. No big deal, Taylor thought. He was 26, an athlete, a risk-taker, a bon vivant. Taylor swam and played rugby, soccer and basketball. On the day he noticed the limp, he was in Santa Monica visiting Chris Vincent, his best friend and a man equally interested in athletics, fitness and fun.

Taylor, who is from London, ignored the limp for as long as he could. It didn’t go away, though. It got worse and he went to the doctor.

“The limp was turning into a twitch,” he says. “I looked a bit like a tap dancer. The doctor I went to see, he did certain things to my body and all of a sudden my body dropped to one side. So did his face.”

This wasn’t good. Not at all. After some more tests, the diagnosis was confirmed.

“I had multiple sclerosis,” Taylor says. “The doctor told me, ‘Well, there you are. Off you go and good luck.’ ”

That was eight years ago. Today Taylor, 34, will be part of the team from Britain that is participating in the Turning the Tides MS Marathon Swim. Five teams of six swimmers will race 38 miles from Catalina to the Santa Monica Pier. Besides Britain, teams will represent the United States, Canada, Germany and Latin America.

Taylor is the first MS sufferer who uses a wheelchair to swim the English Channel. It turns out that swimming has been Taylor’s salvation.

“If I’d known the full extent of what can happen with MS, I might have jumped under a bus,” Taylor says after taking a training swim off Manhattan Beach. “I wasn’t given much information and no hint of hope that things could be done.”

It wasn’t until Taylor did some research himself and went to a second doctor that he learned of drug therapies to help stall the progress of the incurable disease. And it was an accident that showed Taylor he should get back into the pool.

“I love sunbathing and I was out in the hot sun one day and I was totally debilitated,” he says. “I dragged myself into the pool and the cold water was instant relief. There’s this big, outdoor pool in London that’s not heated. I started swimming there. A mile, two miles, three miles. That started getting boring so I decided, why not try the English Channel?”

After training for six months, Taylor made it across the 21 miles of very cold water. The publicity brought him tons of letters and lots of e-mail, mostly from young people, many with MS.

“In England, MS seemed known as an old person’s disease,” he says. “At age 26, I was being invited to evenings of sing-alongs and bingo. Bloody hell, life seemed over.”

Hearing from all these other people with his disease gave Taylor the idea of swimming to raise money for MS research.

This is the third fund-raising relay swim. Each swimmer goes for an hour. Vincent, who had met Taylor 15 years ago in London, had the idea of this Catalina-to-Santa Monica swim.

Vincent had been a track athlete at UCLA in the early 1990s and had made the 1996 Olympics as part of Portugal’s track team--he has Portuguese grandparents--and had settled down in Santa Monica to run his own personal-training business.

“What I’m not, is a swimmer,” Vincent, 30, says. “I ran for the Santa Monica track club for several years. I could have put together a great track team. Carl Lewis, Leroy Burrell, those guys would run for me. I had to do some networking to find swimmers for our U.S. team.”

Taylor’s disease had progressed from where he could walk with a limp “to where I needed walking sticks to needing a wheelchair. At first I didn’t want to acknowledge the disease. I was running around, working too hard, traveling all over the place and my health kept getting worse. Tiring yourself out makes the disease worse. I had to get smart.”

A graphic artist by his college training, Taylor now owns a small business called Spirit Partnerships, a corporate communications company. Vincent’s business is called Training Adventure, and Vincent whips people into shape for extreme sports and triathlons.

“Ever since I’ve known Mike, he’s been getting me into trouble, leaving me places, doing fun, crazy things,” Vincent says.

“We’ve been windsurfing and cliff diving and for the last eight years since he’s had MS, that has just motivated Mike to do bigger and better things.”

So the best friends will do another crazy thing this weekend. Taylor will swim and Vincent, the coordinator, will be in the support boat. It will be Taylor in the cold water, his respite, his best rehab.

The swimmers hope to reach Santa Monica pier early this afternoon. Then there will be a great party.

Well-deserved.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.