Amputee runner shoots for the Olympic trials

HICKSVILLE, N.Y. — Runner's World magazine declared her one of the "heroes" of running and honored her at a dinner in Manhattan the night before the New York City Marathon in November.

She was nominated for a 2007 ESPY award — given to outstanding athletes in various sports by the cable network ESPN — and attracted a national sponsor, PowerBar.

Now she's trying to do something no other runner like her has ever done — qualify for the U.S. Olympic trials marathon.

Amy Palmiero-Winters is garnering such attention, in part, because what separates the 35-year-old Hicksville, N.Y., resident from the rest of the pack is that she is an amputee: a mother of two with a prosthesis below her left knee and an extraordinary amount of strength, toughness and determination above it.

That strength has taken her a long way — although, in her mind, there are still many miles to go. To reach the women's marathon trials, April 20 in Boston, Palmiero-Winters has to run a qualifying time of 2 hours, 47 minutes. There, she would compete against the top female distance runners in America; the top three will go to Beijing for the 2008 Summer Olympics.

That's not a realistic goal for Palmiero-Winters; simply getting to the trials would be a historic achievement for any amputee, because disabled athletes have their own quadrennial international competition, the Paralympics. But if she can somehow run fast enough, USA Track and Field, the governing body of the sport, says it would be willing to accept her.

"If she achieves the Olympic trials qualifying standard, I am not aware of anything that would prevent her from competing in the Olympic trials," USATF spokeswoman Jill Geer says, adding that she personally found Palmiero-Winters' achievements "inspiring."

She'll attempt to make the qualifying time on March 2 at the Sarasota Marathon in Florida. Knocking 17 minutes off her personal best time in the marathon to meet the Olympic trials qualifying standard is a tall order for any runner, especially one whose leg contains more carbon fiber than calcium. But then again, even though it's a longshot, she's the first amputee distance runner fast enough to even seriously consider it. Let's not set limits, here, however. "Who's really to say what you can and cannot do?" Palmiero-Winters says.

Battling back

What she has done since becoming an amputee has been little short of extraordinary. Although amputee records are spotty and not officially sanctioned, it's believed that she has already twice broken the world record. As for how she came to be running on a prosthesis, she'll tell you the gory details without a trace of bitterness or self-pity.

"All my life (my family) raced motorcycles, dirt bikes," she says with a shrug, as if suggesting that what happened next was, if not inevitable, certainly predictable. "I was riding my motorcycle, a woman pulled out in front of me, I crushed my left foot between the car and the bike."

That was in April 1994 in her hometown of Meadville, Pa. Over the next three years, Palmiero-Winters underwent 27 surgeries to repair her foot. Finally, she says, "I told them to take it off." They did, but when an infection caused by a poorly fitting prosthesis spread into her bone, surgeons had to cut "a few" more inches off.

Besides bike riding, Palmiero-Winters' passion had always been running. She was a track star in high school and before the accident had clocked a respectable 3:16 time in the Boston Marathon. That part of her life, she was told after the accident, was over.

"All kinds of things spark your fire," she says. "Them telling me I'd never run again did it for me."

She first tried a generic walking prosthesis a few months after surgery. "It was like running on a stick," she says. "By the time I was done, my limb would be bloody and blistered."

Palmiero-Winters went searching for prosthetic companies that had experience working with athletes. She eventually found one — called A Step Ahead — in a place she had never heard of: Hicksville.

Low-tech, high performance

The company, which opened in 2001, had quite a track record of its own. Clients included local amputee athletes such as Sarah Reinertsen, the above-the-knee amputee runner-turned-"Amazing Race" star, and Tommy Koehler, a former New York City police officer who lost his leg as the result of a gunbattle in 1994 and became a triathlete and marathoner.

The motto of A Step Ahead is "Live Life Without Limitations," which was exactly what Palmiero-Winters was set on doing. She paid the place a visit in February 2006.

The company's 14,000-square-foot facility is unusual — a sort of combination fitness center, machine shop and Hollywood special-effects lab. A treadmill in one room adjoins a workshop filled with tables of artificial limbs and facial prostheses. What Palmiero-Winters needed was a high-performance limb, one that required a delicate balance to compensate for the impact forces of her fast running.

"It had to be perfect," says prosthetist Erik Schaffer, president of A Step Ahead. "If the prosthesis is too soft, there won't be enough of a give back ... a spring back ... and she'd feel as if she'd be running in the mud. If it's too stiff and hard, she won't be able to maintain speed."

Schaffer, who's been a prosthetist for 21 years, went into the lab and designed the ideal running leg for the lean, 5-foot-6 Palmiero-Winters, consisting of a strong, carbon fiber socket and a foot shaped like a backward C. The "foot" is composed of 600 microscopic layers of carbon graphite weave that Schaffer purchased from a manufacturer that supplies similar material to NASA for use on the Space Shuttle. In an inspired, low-tech touch, he then placed at the bottom of this robotic-looking limb a 5-inch-wide piece of a Goodyear tire. Attached with a specially formulated adhesive, this was her "shoe," replacing the sole of a traditional running shoe that most amputee runners used.

"The tire lasts longer," Schaffer explains.

Palmiero-Winters' rubber was ready to meet the road.

As Schaffer continued to tinker with various iterations of her leg, Palmiero-Winters began working with coach David Balsley, a physical therapist who used to practice on Long Island but now works in Manhattan, specializing in amputee runners.

"They (A Step Ahead) called me and said, 'We've got this girl from Pennsylvania who's really talented and really wants to run,' " Balsley recalls. After talking to her, he said he realized "this is somebody special."

Special enough that, between Balsley's tutelage and Schaffer's state-of-the-art prosthesis, Palmiero-Winters was soon running faster on one leg than she had on two.

"We had her doing 60 to 70 miles a week, which was unheard of for amputees," Balsley says. During her speed sessions, done on a treadmill, she is regularly clocked at a heart-pounding 12 mph (a brisk walk on the treadmill at the gym for a fit adult is about 4 mph).

Hardly an "advantage"

There are some who question whether such a high-tech prosthesis actually gives the amputee runner an unfair advantage. In fact, South African double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius was just ruled ineligible to compete in the Beijing Olympics because, the track-and-field governing body ruled, his prosthetic racing blades are "technical aids."

After a race last year, Palmiero-Winters faced the same attitude from a male competitor who finished behind her.

"I told him, 'You think having this prosthesis is an advantage? Take it, then, by all means,' " she recalls.

What people fail to realize, Balsley notes, is that any advantage in having what is essentially a piece of machinery for a leg is outweighed by the maintenance involved. During a marathon, amputees have to stop frequently to change the silicon liner that covers their residual limb (and that is inserted in the socket of the prosthesis), which gets sweaty and can't dissipate moisture like the exposed skin of an able-bodied runner. To do this, Palmiero-Winters will carry a towel to dry her liner. Having to stop, however, to take off and wipe down the liner costs precious minutes during a race. Moreover, because runners lose weight as they sweat during a race, the snug fit of the prosthesis may change, and runners may have to put on an extra sock to accommodate the change. This, too, costs time.

Staying tough

The training paid off over the past year and a half, as Palmiero-Winters knocked her marathon times down a whopping 20 minutes, from 3:24 in Cleveland in May 2006 to 3:04 in Chicago five months later.

The first part of 2007 was not as successful. Four miles into the Boston Marathon in April, her C-foot slipped on a plastic cup left on the road. Her residual limb and prosthetic buckled, smashing what was left of her tibia bone into the socket, with pain that one can only imagine. "It's not easy running on this," she says.

She came back, however, running 1:25 in a half marathon in Philadelphia in September. By then, she had moved to Hicksville to be closer to the support team that takes care of her legs — including one "formal leg" that she jokes is for "hot dates," and that cost $25,000 to $30,000. (She is separated from her husband of four years, Jon Winters.) She's also working part time at A Step Ahead while taking care of her children, son Carson, 4, and daughter Madilynn, 2.

It's tough, but ... well, so is Amy Palmiero-Winters. Whether she's tough and talented enough to compete with the fastest able-bodied women in America remains to be seen, but one thing's for certain: Among the so-called physically challenged, there's no one who can challenge her. "Nobody's going to come close for a long time," Balsley says.