The scars on her legs, knees and elbows are the dog-eared pages of Maureen Manley's life. That's how it is when you're a bike racer: You get to meet the pavement every once in a while.

As a world-class cyclist, she'd just worked through it whenever she felt tired or sick. "In cycling, suffering is what you do," she says. "You hurt."

But the blurring vision that plagued her in 1991, as she and her U.S. women's cycling teammates approached world title competition — well, it was just the darnedest thing.

Back then, she was at the top of her game — in her third year with the women's American cycling team, who'd ridden to silver at the 1990 world championships. But within a year, Manley would be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, or MS, and one of the world's best cyclists would need a cane just to make it across the driveway.

No, that's not her story: The scars that tell the real tale are mostly on the inside. This weekend, the 40-year-old former cycling champ, who lives in Kirkland, will race in the Group Health MS150 Bike Tour in La Conner, continuing an improbable comeback that has inspired her work as motivational speaker.

She says: You must be a creative force in your own health.

You have to behave your way to success.

And maybe most important: The human spirit is always bigger than the conditions in life.

As a girl growing up in Thousand Oaks, Calif., Manley learned to ride a bicycle from three older brothers. Before long, she had visions of herself zooming past roaring crowds, never mind that women's cycling didn't exist as a sport. "Ever since I can remember, I dreamed about being a great cyclist," she says.

She pursued cycling as an all-around athlete able at soccer, softball, track and field. In 1984, her world changed, she says, when she saw Connie Carpenter-Phinney's at-the-wire win in the Olympic Games' first-ever women's cycling event.

The college men's cycling team didn't mind when she started hanging around team practices as a freshman at California State University, Chico. Mostly, they enjoyed leaving her in the dust; within a year, she was not only keeping pace but beating most of them.

She next set her sights on the U.S. women's team, which trained in nearby Fresno. She proved competitive enough that the national coach took notice. Instead of being awed, Manley felt an adventure unfolding as though sewn to her dreams. By 1989, she had claimed a spot on the U.S. squad.

Years later, she would struggle to ride.

Then ... she would struggle to run.

And finally, to walk.

Twice as many women as men are diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a neurological disorder in which the immune system attacks the central nervous system, tampering with the circuitry. People lose vision and coordination, suffer paralysis, get tired. Signals can't get through.

Gradually, the body over which Manley had had complete control, that had been so loyal and perfect and beautiful, was betraying her.

"I was going in reverse," she says.

It was her year — 1991, the third consecutive year she'd race with the U.S. team in world competition; the year before, she and other national team members had graced boxes of Multi Bran Chex. This year, at nationals, Manley would win gold, silver and bronze medals in three separate events. "I was flying," she says. "I wanted to be the best in the world."

The team was favored to take gold at the upcoming world championships in Stuttgart, Germany — for Manley, a prelude to the 1992 Olympics and beyond.

In practice, she felt weak and exhausted, but that happens. Racers blamed a slump, or maybe hitting a peak too soon. "There's a difference between suffering and struggling," she says. "I was suffering and struggling."

What she didn't know is that MS was assaulting her optic nerve every time her body heat rose. At the time trials in Stuttgart, the team finished fourth, and they all knew it was her performance that had brought them down. Then, in the road race, she could barely keep up with the pack.

What was going on? The disappointed team continued on to the Tour de France. In the first stage, the mountain stage, her vision blurred so badly as she crested that she careened off the road and crashed.

That's when they told her it was time to go home. An MRI dealt her diagnosis.

Though racing again was unlikely, she had to try. She returned to training camp in Boulder, Colo., but it was an uphill battle: She raced strong, but not strong enough.

Gradually, everything fell apart. Her self-confidence eroded. Her former teammates were living the life she'd wanted to live. She had to walk away. The sport she'd loved like no other, that had given her life meaning and purpose, was gone.

She decided she wanted to remember the bad days, to have something to look back on with the intention that, eventually, she'd be on the other side. One morning, she replays it on her living-room television.

The video footage is grainy, the setting washed out, as if a dream. That's Manley on the far side of the den, leaning on a cane in sweatshirt and sweatpants, body bent and gnarled, decidedly not in shape. She is in tears.

"Why are you crying?" a voice asks — her ex-husband, with whom she now has a 9-year-old son.

She puts down her cane and squints across the room toward him as if in a fog, her vision is that bad. And begins moving toward the camera, socked feet kneading slow, awkward steps, one after another.

At the time, there were no drug therapies for MS; now there are five — Avonex, Betaseron, Copaxone, Novantrone and Rebif. All aim to slow the effects of the disease, says Dr. James Bowen, associate professor of neurology at the University of Washington Medical Center.

"We don't have any drugs that will reverse the damage," Bowen says. "But it wasn't long ago that we didn't have anything to offer patients."

Manley credits Copaxone with aiding her recovery and firmly espouses such therapies, but knows there's no easy answer. The painful footage is what she recalls when some look for the super pill or antidote that spelled her remarkable improvement. "In this drive-through culture, they're like, 'What did you do?' " she says. "What I chose to do is get on with my life."

Bit by bit, she felt the body machinery coming alive again. Back on the bike, she began testing her body's limits, pushing it harder, raising its tolerance for stress until one day she noticed her vision wasn't blurring anymore.

Her legs weren't what they used to be, but they were getting the job done. She knew she could be better. A few years ago, it occurred to her that she might be ready to compete again.

Her doctor gave the go-ahead. It had been a decade since she'd raced, and one thing quickly became clear: She was nowhere close to what she had been. But in that first race — the Mason Lake Road Race on the Olympic Peninsula — she placed 10th against the event's elite. It wasn't pretty, but after what she'd been through, she said it felt awesome to cross the finish line.

In 2003, she raced seven times, including three centuries — 100-mile jaunts — and a triathlon. Earlier this year, she and a group of cyclists, all wearing Team Copaxone jerseys, were among those who did the 200-mile Seattle-to-Portland race in a day.

One thing she tells audiences is that amid the wilderness of a life-altering situation, you have to learn new rules. Manley now sees cycling not as a means to personal triumph but as a part of something greater. "I will do what I can to rid the planet of this disease," she says, but for now, that finish line is still a blip on the horizon.

Two weekends ago, she mixed it up with local racing's big dogs in the Washington State Hill Climb Championship at Crystal Mountain, near Enumclaw. In that race, in which she came in ninth, she sensed uphill parallels — with her battle against the disease, with the accident in France portending her fall from glory.

It felt great to hurt again. And if you looked closely at the racers crossing the stripe that day, you'd have seen she was the happiest one out there. It's the story she'd written for herself as a girl, coming to pass with new meaning.

She always knew she'd love hearing those cheers as she zoomed past the crowd, but what she couldn't know back then was why.

Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com