Recovery road – From near death, cyclist Mike Bitton completes a miraculous comeback

It’s 6:52 in the morning. Sunrise. Baton Rouge Beach.

With a whir, Mike Bitton glides across the lot and aligns his white bike with my blue one. He sports a boyish grin.

“Morning,” he says. The lilt of his native Canada rings out over the traffic.

We’ve met, reporter and source, for a morning bike ride, not an interview. I leave my notebook in the car.

It’s February, one of those gilded winter days; elixirs that balance out the choking humidity that fills much of our year in the Deep South. We chat about the weather.

The miracle that Bitton is here at all—let alone on his bike—sits unspoken between us like a childhood secret.

Two years ago this month, Bitton was nearly killed during a hit-and-run accident while cycling on River Road. Since the accident, Bitton has wowed doctors, first by surviving, then by riding his bike again.

Last November, Bitton completed the Florida Ironman Triathlon. That’s a 2.4-mile ocean swim and a 112-mile bike ride topped off by a 26.2-mile run.

Bitton jokes that he’s become the “poster boy of bicycling safety” around Baton Rouge. He’s been active in several bike safety campaigns in the past year. He has organized blood drives and races to raise awareness for first responders.

“Every day I have seen Mike, I can tell by the way he walks or how long it takes him to get up that he is still in a whole lot of pain,” says Ben Schuler, one of Bitton’s close friends and an ER nurse. “However, I have never once heard him say ‘Ouch,’ ‘Why me’ or ‘I give up.’ He just keeps going forward.”

“Do you think about the accident when you ride?” I ask as we round the LSU Lakes near Sorority Row.

“Not at all,” he says.

Bitton, a doctoral candidate in geography at LSU, has always paid attention to sunrise and plans his bike rides to coincide with it.

The sun was up at 7:30 on May 15, 2010, when Bitton, a founding member of the LSU cycling team, went out for a training ride and wound up nearly dead in a ditch on the side of River Road.

Of course, Bitton doesn’t remember that day or the weeks after the accident. For him, that part of his life will forever be known through the eyes of onlookers, a bit like the story of the day you were born.

A group of cyclists and a passing National Guard medic found Bitton. He had been on the side of the road for nearly 30 minutes. They called 911.

The Toyota Tundra mangled him. His list of injuries is so long, he attaches it in an email rather than taking the time to list every one. In a standard-size font, it takes up nearly a whole sheet of paper.

The highlights: Five brain bleeds. Seven broken vertebrae. Bleeding lungs. Eleven broken ribs, a split sternum, a hernia, too many abrasions to count, and—pardon the blunt language—a butt cheek scraped down to the nerves.

“I have seen a lot of trauma as an ER nurse, and I honestly did not think Mike would survive the day,” Schuler says. “The whole time in the ER he was white-knuckled and fighting.”

Marshall Hahn was sentenced to five years in October 2011 for hitting Bitton then leaving him to die. Hahn’s attorney, when pleading his case, described Hahn as a “good man who made a bad decision.”

Life comes down to decisions. Whether to get on a bike, for instance. What time to ride. When to forgive others. How to move on.

Bitton can’t comment on Hahn for legal reasons. But it’s clear he doesn’t want to let the actions of another man define him.

As we pull onto Dalrymple, it’s rush hour, and traffic picks up. A handful of cars acts as if the drivers don’t see us at all.

Bitton asks me if I will let my two small children become cyclists. I don’t know the answer. I’ve been to too many memorial services for cyclists. My own husband was hit by a truck while bike-riding. The day Bitton and I ride the lakes, the flowers are still fresh on a “ghost bike” set up beside Perkins Road in memory of late cyclist Nathaniel Crowson. For every miracle story like Bitton’s, there’s one of senseless loss, kids without a mom or dad, endless grief.

“What did your parents say when you told them you wanted to do the Ironman?”

“They didn’t want me to do it,” Bitton says. “They said, ‘Why not just do a 5K run?’ But, to me, anyone can do a 5K.”

“I personally did not want him to ride a bike again on any road,” says Bitton’s mother Anna. “But I knew our son was not a quitter, and he would do whatever it took to reclaim the life he had before the accident.”

The Ironman emerged for Bitton as the only goal big enough to tug him back to life.

“I think it came from me being reduced to absolute nothing and feeling weak and pathetic,” he says. “I was physically and mentally destroyed. If I was going to get back to being proud and respectful of myself, I had to get there myself.”

Bitton launched his Ironman bid by spinning for 10 minutes on an indoor trainer a few months after the accident. Doctors told him it might take three years before he’d be able to get on a bike again. Bitton laughed at that estimate.

To acknowledge the accident one year after it happened, Bitton went for a 62-mile ride. He built on that, conducting the majority of his rides on the very road where he almost took his last breath.

Bitton focuses on the positives. He’d rather skip talking about theribbon of pain that weaves through and around every minute of his life. But it’s always there.

“He will always have restrictions with bending, lifting and static positioning,” says Go Physical Therapy owner Gloria Wall, Bitton’s physical therapist.

Without fail, Bitton starts each day with exercises geared to strengthen his trunk and balance. Then he swims, rides and runs.

By the time Ironman race day came around, Bitton’s biggest concern as he burned through a seemingly endless headwind was finishing his ride before the LSU-Alabama kickoff that night. He finished in 11 hours and 45 minutes. “An okay result,” he says.

“I would have been inspired if Mike would have just simply lived,” Schuler says. “But to have witnessed what Mike has done has exceeded inspiration. It has moved on to miraculous.”