Amid the audible breathing and the quiet whoosh of bodies slamming into air molecules, there was a sound out of place: thump, thump, thump.
It was early morning at the indoor track at the Swinney Recreation Center on the University of Missouri-Kansas City campus, and the sound was growing quickly louder.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Closer and closer it came. THUMP. THUMP.
Whoosh, there it went. THUMP. THUMP. Thump. Thump. Thump. Bounding along on one leg, stout as a tree trunk, and on one curvaceous J-shaped bar of carbon graphite, was Jeremy Burleson.
“He’s awesome,” said one of the two men watching him. It was Keith Andrews, a certified prosthetist from Independence, Mo., “I’ve never seen anyone with so much talent, drive and focus.”
At the moment, Burleson is not focusing on a college degree nor on a career. Burleson, 22, is set on qualifying for the Paralympic Games for disabled athletes to be held in the year 2000 in Australia. He runs a mile in six minutes and did 100 meters in 13.85 seconds before he began training a couple of months ago. He aims to run even faster to qualify for the 100- and 200-meter events in Australia.
Fastest man in the world . . . he likes the sound of that.
Sports have always been front and center in his life. It was wrestling and football when he was in high school in St. Joseph, Mo. He entered the Marine Corps in December 1994 in part, he said, because it was the only place he could get paid for building his quadriceps.
In October 1995, his athletic training came to an abrupt halt when a leg was crushed under a howitzer being transported along a country road. Doctors later amputated.
These days, Burleson has one more reason for competing: “A lot of amputees think their life is over when something like this happens. I think this will help to push other people.”
Watching Burleson recently, along with Andrews, was the University of Missouri-Kansas City track coach, Dave Krueger. For about a month, Krueger has been advising Burleson, even though Burleson isn’t on the team. Having just enrolled this semester in his first class–wrestling–at UMKC, he doesn’t qualify to be part of the team yet. But Krueger is fascinated and impressed by this one-legged dynamo.
If Burleson, who has applied to study physical therapy at Missouri Western State College in St. Joseph, decides instead to stay and pursue an undergraduate degree at UMKC, Krueger expects to add him to the team.
“He’s getting a lot better,” Krueger said as Burleson thumped down the straightaway toward them, his arms pumping furiously. “He’s gonna be there.”
Burleson doesn’t remember feeling any pain until medics stuck a needle full of morphine into him as he lay in a helicopter en route to the Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu. This runner believes in the painkilling power of endorphins. He thinks his body started medicating itself moments after the trauma.
That was October 1995. He and several other Marines in his unit were hauling a howitzer behind their truck down a steep and bumpy one-lane road during training in Hawaii. Burleson, seated on a bench toward the back of the open-bed truck, was assigned to keep an eye on the cannon.
A sports car approached and the truck’s driver edged over the side of the road to allow the car to pass. As the driver turned at a sharp angle to return to the roadbed, Burleson slid to the back of the truck and the howitzer toppled over, crushing his right leg, which was hanging over the back of the truck.
At the hospital, his doctors laid out Burleson’s options: “They said it was my choice to keep it or have it removed. But if I kept it, I would never run again.”
It didn’t take Burleson long to decide.
“All I’ve done my whole life is run,” he said.
In the operating room he counted to three. When he awoke, his right leg was gone, about 3 inches below the knee.
After three months of physical therapy and with an artificial leg in tow, Burleson resumed duty, processing papers for about five months. In the spring of 1996, he returned home to St. Joseph with a list of local prosthetists. He wasn’t content to simply hobble along on an artificial limb. He intended to run, not walk.
As it turned out, Burleson was just the man Andrews was looking for. In midsummer of 1996 when the phone rang in Andrews’ office at Nova-Care, an Independence, Mo.-based provider of orthotics and prosthetics, he could hardly contain his excitement when Burleson began to explain what he was after.
“I’d been looking for runners,” Andrews said.
About a year ago, a California prosthetics-maker, Flex-Foot Inc., began to market a prosthesis made specifically for sprinting. It put a kink in the J-shaped “foot” to increase speed. Another important recent development, according to Andrews, is a new gel liner at the top of the prosthesis that cushions the amputated leg during vigorous, jarring physical activity.
With his old liner, Burleson said, he needed extensive recovery time.
“I’d run one day, and take three or four off.”
Now, he trains almost every day.
“Before, I would do 30 minutes. Now, I do an hour or hour and a half.”
Over the last 18 months, Andrews has fitted the hard-driving Burleson with a succession of six prosthetic legs. That’s about $48,000 worth of legs: three for walking, three for running.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has paid for most of them. Nova-Care donated the last one. Burleson, who works 40 or more hours a week servicing cars at a tire store and assisting the physical therapists at a St. Joseph hospital, isn’t certain where he’ll find the funds for legs to come. He has put donation cans out in stores in St. Joseph.
