From the archives: The once unstoppable firefighter and Ironman suffered horrific injuries when he was hit by a bus. Then he had to do something even harder: learn to live again.
but already Matt Long is in a rush. The career fireman knows the importance of moving fast: It can save a life. Today, however, he can’t seem to move quick enough.
For a while, Long joins in as the jokes fly, but he has other things on his mind. The fast-talking, hard-charging fireman is about to run the slowest race of his life, and even if he finishes, he’s surely going to suffer. He paces around like his life depends on what happens over the next 26 miles. And maybe it does.York City woke up to 28°F temperatures and day three of a transit strike.
Long, 39 at the time, fit in perfectly at the Rock. He was relentlessly upbeat and radiated strength. He came from blue-collar Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and a family with eight siblings. He had two brothers in the FDNY. Long had worked amid the chaos at Ground Zero on 9/11. And he had a “save” to his credit. On Christmas Eve 2000, his company responded to a fire in a tenement that was thought to be abandoned. But while putting out the fire, Long saw a stack of mail in front of one apartment.
As it turned out, all four made it. Long went 3:13:59, good enough to place fourth among the 201 New York firefighters who ran. They’d start ramping up for Boston right after New Year’s. It took a couple of minutes for the officers to free Long. They rolled him onto a backboard, pushed him from under the bus, and lifted him onto a gurney. At that point, Long was drifting in and out of consciousness, though he managed to mouth the word forty. Buckley looked at his face; it was pasty white but familiar. He remembered a fireman who used to park his car in front of his firehouse to run in nearby Central Park.
Lorich worked to stabilize Long’s broken pelvis. “All the big blood vessels are coming through the pelvis from the aorta and going down to your legs, so when he ripped everything, he tore all those arteries,” says Lorich. “And it ripped through his anus and tore his rectum out, so he’s pouring stool into the pelvis.”
So why didn’t Long die? One theory, says Eachempati, is that “we actually got the blood loss controlled within eight to 10 hours.” Just as critical, the doctor adds, Long was “obviously very fit, and that definitely contributed to his survivability. His body was resilient enough to withstand such a metabolic insult.
Long was popular with the ladies, too. He dated, often. There was the pretty brunette with whom he made eye contact as he was watching the marathon by his firehouse—a look that yielded a few dates with the young actress. There was the girl from Bay Ridge, but that crumbled after they ran a marathon together. And there was the girl he was engaged to, but they never made it to the altar. As one friend said, “He was always looking for the right one.
Still, Lorich was stunned by how quickly he healed. On May 24, 2006, five months after getting run over by the bus, Long got the okay to go home. He held a press conference in the hospital lobby before leaving. Every major New York City TV station, radio station, and newspaper covered it. He came off an elevator in a wheelchair, then stood and walked to a podium on crutches. Flashbulbs blinked, and family, friends, and hospital staff in attendance applauded.
Gimping around the city streets on crutches left him nervous about what might tip him over. And while he had no memory of that morning when his life changed, he still winced when a bus would come to a stop nearby. More and more, he came to realize how challenging his life was and would continue to be. “I have disappointment in my life, and mental struggles every day,” he said one day nearly a year after he left the hospital.
One day Long visited a psychiatrist and ran down what was playing in his head. He listed the things he’d wanted to do with his life: run more marathons, do more triathlons, maybe get married. He said he was the guy who made sure everyone enjoyed themselves, that their glasses were filled and they went home laughing. That was Matty Long. That’s who he wanted back.
Eileen Long held her breath for a moment, tears welling in her eyes. She looked over at her husband, glassy-eyed, too. Then at her crying 40-year-old son. And then she let him have it. “If you want to miss family parties and sit around in your apartment feeling sorry for yourself, go ahead. But let me ask you, Do you want to be miserable all your life?”“Well, then be miserable, but let me tell you, you have a lot to offer people other than misery.
Or maybe it was that psychiatrist. Maybe he had a point. Maybe it was time to let others make him feel good. On December 22, 2007, after two years of rehabilitation and 40 surgeries, Long traded his crutches in for a cane. Within a few days, he did his first pool workout and booked November 2, 2008, to run the New York City Marathon. He had less than 11 months to learn how to run again.Images of Long’s 2008 marathon run : meeting his family in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn; getting a boost from firefighters in Park Slope; and hitting the wall in Central Park with Carino and Flynn by his side.
The fun evaporates near mile 22. This is where most marathoners start to wonder if they have enough left to finish, if they’ve prepared enough. The point when the head hurts as much as the quads. But Long isn’t like the runners around him. He couldn’t prepare enough. He only began running in March. His longest training run was 14 miles. And already, today, he’s run for more than six hours, twice as long as the people passing him, on a contorted left foot that’s killing him.
A few weeks later, he returned to New York and saw Jim Wharton, a sports physiologist known for his flexibility techniques. Long wanted to be taken on as a patient. On his application, where it asked for his medical condition, he simply wrote, “Fucked.” When Wharton saw that, he chuckled; the two hit it right off. Long shared his plan to run the marathon that fall. That’s when Wharton knew the guy was serious.
That meant much more than running 26 miles. It meant that he’d be back among people with whom, for so long, he shared life and its pleasures. People who ran and biked and swam for hours each day, not because they expected to win marathons or Ironmans, but simply because they loved to compete, participate, work hard—and laugh, too. Friends whom he could talk to about training plans and nutrition strategies and who didn’t bug him about his different pains or his limp or his psyche.
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