Once a Runner…

Tara Butcher will never forget the day, in May 2006, when the treadmill terrified her.

With hands gripping the rails with such intensity that her knuckles turned white, the lifelong recreational runner from La Jolla, California, took her first tentative step, the belt beneath her moving at a turtle-esque 2 miles per hour. Butcher was scared to go faster. She didn’t know how much weight her left leg could handle, because she no longer had the lower part of it. From just below her knee, the 24-year-old wore a titanium, L-shaped bar. A running prosthesis. She was newly a runner. Again.

In May 2005, Butcher had been involved in a minor fender bender on a Southern California freeway. She got out of her car to assess the damage and was struck head-on at 75 miles per hour by an oncoming car. The blow catapulted her body over two lanes, where she landed hard, on her back, in the middle of the road. “I was pretty much broken,” Butcher says now.

In fact, her right leg was broken; her neck separated from her head. (All that kept Butcher from paralysis or death was what doctors called the remaining “string cheese” that connected her head to her spine.) Her left leg was destroyed from the midcalf down, and there was trauma to her abdomen. Yet the firefighter who first reached her reported that she was struggling to get up.

She has never stopped.

When Butcher woke after a week of surgeries and heavy sedation, she learned that her neck and spine were fused together with a metal plate and bone from her hip, and her lower leg was totally gone.

Faith, Hope, and Drive
Three months after her accident, Butcher got her first prosthesis—a walking leg with an attached foot—and relearned how to walk. She was able to return to her job as a hairstylist, but standing all day left her exhausted, emotionally as well as physically. She was weak, her balance was off, and she limped. The muscles in her left leg had atrophied so much that her left thigh was 2 inches smaller than her right.

“I knew it could be better, but I also knew there was no way I could go to a gym by myself,” she says. “I needed help.”

In January 2006, Butcher joined the Downtown La Jolla West 24 Hour Fitness in San Diego and started training with fitness manager Kris Mukherji. Together, they took baby steps to build her strength, flexibility, and balance. Butcher did half-lunges, holding Mukherji’s hands. She practiced stepping up on only her left leg, using his shoulder for support. She labored on the StairMaster for 5 minutes at a time. When she did leg presses with her left leg, she doubted whether her prosthesis would support the weight. She worried a lot about falling. At home, she practiced balancing on her left leg while brushing her teeth.

“There were countless times when I’d demonstrate an exercise to Tara and she’d say, ‘There’s no way I can do that,’” says Mukherji. “But then she’d do it, with good form and good technique. I knew that I was dealing with a girl who is phenomenal.”

Enter Butcher’s titanium running prosthesis.

Since she often took smaller steps with her left leg, Mukherji helped Butcher even out her stride by placing protein bars on the gym floor that nerve-wracking first day on the treadmill in May 2006.

In June, she hit a landmark: She ran her first mile. It was easy, she remembers—“like nothing had ever happened.”
“It’s all about what a person wants to put into it,” says Mukherji. “From the beginning, Tara was ready to do whatever it took.”

In Butcher’s case, it took everything she had just to find the courage to face her new identity.

“My confidence shut down when this happened,” she says. “I was so down on myself about my body image. Being in an industry where image is really important—where clients look to hairstylists to be fashion icons—was hard for me.” She remembers returning from the hospital and looking at her closet full of skirts and stiletto heels—her working wardrobe. “I just cried. I knew I wouldn’t be wearing them,” she says. Now, she’s back in cowboy boots, cute flats, and ballet slippers. She’s come to realize, however, that her body’s true appeal is in the magic of its healing and resiliency; image is no longer so important.

“When I go to the gym and see what I can do, see how strong I am, it helps me feel more confident at work, with dating, with friendships.”

Today, Butcher’s workouts with Mukherji are “crazy hard-core,” she says. She powers through three sets of 15 one-legged squats, holding 12-pound dumbbells in each hand. Balancing on the flat side of a Bosu ball, she does bent-over rows and biceps curls. She also racks up 30 minutes on the elliptical machine and runs close to 2 miles on the treadmill twice a week.

She has run several 5-Ks, and eventually wants to run a marathon. “I love to run,” Butcher says simply. “I remember, before the accident, getting that runner’s high—and I want it back.”

The “miracle case,” as her doctors call her, pauses, just a beat. “I always knew I could go one of two ways with this,” Butcher adds. “I could lie in bed, be depressed, not do anything, and take pain pills. Or I could fight—work out, try my hardest, and be the strongest and in the best shape that I can be. There’s no in-between with this. I chose to fight.” And run.