The Toughest Lap

For weeks after his accident, Pipoly had avoided the slight curb at the end of his driveway. Then finally he forced himself to confront it.

"I fell right out of the wheelchair, right on my face while my wheelchair is rolling down the street," he recalls. "This guy pulls up and he is totally freaked out." Then he saw that Pipoly was laughing, and "He's like, 'You nut!' I was laughing because I was thinking about how afraid I was."

It was the first time Pipoly had fallen out of his wheelchair. He's done it "a thousand times since then," he says.

This spring, Pipoly moved to the District to train with his old coach, Mark Joyner, swimming coach of the 1984 U.S. Olympic pentathlon team, for a 24-mile race across Tampa Bay. He had trained all winter and was ready. Then one night, after returning from dinner to the townhouse he shares with Joyner, Pipoly had paused at the top of the stairs when one of the wheels on his chair started backsliding. Before he knew it he was tumbling down, bouncing on almost every step until he hit the bottom.

He was rushed to Howard University Hospital, where doctors splinted his broken left leg. Five days later, surgeons at Sibley Memorial Hospital put a rod in the leg, from the knee to the hip.

It would have been understandable if Pipoly quit at that point, but Joyner said that is not who he is.

"He has a high threshold for pain -- his ability to tolerate discomfort, excessive training or overexertion," says Joyner. When Pipoly was younger, Joyner says, "when the other kids were fatigued he was always wanting to do more."

So with the Tampa swim out of reach, Pipoly began looking for a new challenge.

Then he thought back to his accident. He never reached the reservoir that day.

Last month, his leg still in a cast, Pipoly began training again.

He would return to the Ruedi Reservoir and swim the 17 miles across it. The water, he knows, will be breathtakingly cold. The altitude -- more than 10,000 feet above sea level -- will make it even harder.

It will be a tough place for him to go for other reasons as well. But he hopes to somehow find the person who called 911 that February day in 1998 and saved his life. And thank him or her.

Pipoly laughs now at the dull ache that engulfed him as the lanky 11-year-old kid who sobbed uncontrollably on the beach after failing to swim the English Channel.

Now he's back at the Y, putting in 6,500 meters a day -- more than most able-bodied swimmers can imagine.

A group of kids comes out of the locker room with bare feet and lunch bags.

Pipoly drags his good leg out of the water and then pulls his broken one, still swollen, out of the shallows. "How do I look?" he shouts with a wide grin to his girlfriend, Vanessa Vance, watching from her wheelchair.

"You look good!" one of the regulars shouts back to him.

"I feel good," he says, resting his body against the wall.

If he can keep going, he figures, swim the reservoir, then he can do even tougher swims.

And find that Zen again.