The Toughest Lap

The device, which helps him stand and even take a few steps with the help of a walker, primarily is for exercise. Because of his spinal cord injury, he is dependent on his wheelchair.

Pipoly fidgets in his chair, trying to hold his right leg still as it bounces up and down sporadically. These muscle spasms are a daily part of his reality now.

He opens his talk with a joke about a farmer and his three-legged pig to warm up the crowd as they eat dinner, but it isn't until he begins to talk about some of his struggles after the accident that the sounds of forks clanging against plates stop.

"In the hospital I was thinking about all the things I wouldn't be able to do, and I remember pushing that morphine drip button just as much for that fear as for the pain that I was feeling," he says. "I would wake up and all that fear would just come down on me and all I wanted to do was go back to sleep again."

Even after his rehab, when he was supposed to resume his normal life, he would go to pull himself up from the bed and the realization would sink in and he would lie flat, staring at the ceiling.

Sometimes he would go for days without sleeping, he recalls, because of the muscle spasms in his legs. Some days he would miss work at a photo lab and stay in bed, daydreaming about all of the things he used to do. He would flip the remote and drift in and out of sleep, getting out of bed just to go to the bathroom.

Eventually he learned to drive again. Then he would make the short trip from his apartment to the liquor store, plop his money on the counter and retreat to his apartment to spend the day downing Left Hand Beer. Sometimes he smoked weed. Other days he snorted cocaine.

He never reached the proverbial bottom, he says wryly, until he ran out of drugs. For almost a year his priority was escaping the daily realities of his life.

The first Christmas after his accident he went to his mother's house. He was quiet and morose, showing little interest in anything but the television. Out of desperation, she took out an old videotape and popped it into the VCR. It was a tape of Jason, age 11, on "The Tonight Show."

"He almost made it across and he said he is going back to try to swim it again!" Johnny Carson tells the audience, by way of introducing the young Pipoly. In the interview, he recalls how the crowds had cheered and the television lights had followed his progress. He describes how close he came to matching the feat his father had accomplished as a grown man. He seems undaunted, determined to try again, determined to succeed.

After the holiday, Pipoly returned to San Antonio, where he had moved to be near his father. He started thinking about the sport he had drifted away from not long after his attempt to swim the English Channel. He started thinking about the water. A year and a half after his accident, Pipoly decided to try to swim again.

When he finally got up the courage to get into the pool, he found that all he could do was float on his back and move his arms around for about 30 minutes. He went home in tears. He went back the next day and stayed in the water for 45 minutes. After a week he started to swim on his stomach. Within a short time, he could swim a dozen pool lengths.

Three years later he reached the shore of Wissant, France. He had conquered the 21-mile English Channel in 13 hours 48 minutes. There were no camera crews. No cheering crowds. But a representative of the Channel Swimming Association was there to certify Jason Pipoly as the first paraplegic from the United States to successfully swim the Channel.

A year later, he became the first paraplegic to cross the 21-mile Catalina Channel, according to the Catalina Channel Swimming Federation. He gave up on the return leg of the swim, after spending 24 hours in the currents, fighting off physical and mental exhaustion.