Straight Ahead, One Foot in Front of the Other

March 19, 2008

By MICHAEL BRICK

BERGENFIELD, N.J. — The track coach wears a vest of rigid plastic. Mounted at the shoulders, a great tangle of hardware rises to fix a metallic band in Saturnian suspension around her skull. Four long screws penetrate her scalp, locking her neck upright, chin parallel to the earth, sea blue eyes on some point in the middle distance.

“You can feel it going in your head,” the coach, Erin O. Taylor, 29, said after a doctor tightened the incursions with a screwdriver. “It’s really scary.”

The surgeons call this architecture a halo. The halo sets limits. From inside, Taylor cannot look backward, or down.

Behind her is a wreck on the highway. Driving her student-athletes from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan to a meet in New England in January, Taylor flipped a rented van onto a median and fractured eight vertebrae. Two of the girls on the team were badly injured, one paralyzed below the waist.

As she tries to come to terms with the crash, Taylor faces a long physical recovery, a city investigation and lawsuits. The students still speak of her with admiring fondness, but she cannot finish the season as their coach.

“She feels like she let the girls down,” her father, Larry Taylor, said by telephone from Oregon. “That’s what coaching was all about for her, was helping those girls.”

So Taylor has turned her focus inward, redoubling her own athletic training even as her spinal column mends. Accomplished in the strange and hardy discipline of racewalking, she aspires to make the United States Olympic track and field team for the Beijing Games.

No one can say her odds with any certainty. World-class coaches and an experienced physical therapist have taken up her cause. With their help, Taylor can imagine a summertime free of the halo, her body toned as ever, performing the taxing choreography of her sport to the delight of the Stuyvesant athletes she still calls “my girls.”

“I’ve been trying to figure out why I do this, and it’s just because I have to, because I need to, because I want to,” Taylor said. “Not doing it isn’t an option anymore, and I don’t know when it started not being an option.”

A Scene of Chaos

Interstate 91 rises to a slight incline near Hartford, Vt. A mound separates the north and the southbound lanes. The speed limit is 65 miles an hour.

Around 3 p.m. on Jan. 12, a Ford E-350 van approached Mile Marker 68 at the speed limit in the right-hand northbound lane, state police records show.

Inside, eight teenage girls were strapped into their seats. They had been on the road since 10:30 a.m. All were asleep but Yangchen Dolma, 15, who was reading a book in a rear seat.

They were heading to a tournament at Dartmouth College, where the girls could find broader competition in longer races outside the Public Schools Athletic League. The sky was cloudy, the road dry. As another driver watched from behind, the van crossed the passing lane onto the median, traveled 311 feet and crested the mound.

“Oh my God,” someone called, according to a statement Dolma gave the police. The van flipped twice and landed driver’s side down. Police cars, rescue units and a helicopter responded with extraction gear.

“It was such chaos,” Sgt. Gerry Goguen of the state police said in a telephone interview.

Paramedics took the van’s passengers to Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Those on the driver’s side were badly hurt. Lucia Hsiao, 16, fractured a vertebra. Valerie Piro, 16, was paralyzed from the waist down.

Inspecting the crash site, Trooper Richard Slusser found no tire marks to indicate braking. He issued Taylor a warning for failing to maintain her lane. His report did not elaborate on a cause, noting only that Taylor “could not recall leaving the road.”

From there, two lines of inquiry began.

Fredric Eisenberg, a lawyer for Piro and Hsiao, has filed notice of a lawsuit seeking unspecified damages against the Ford Motor Company, Avis Budget Group, the Department of Education, the city and Taylor, named as an agent of the school.

Eisenberg said the students’ parents had given Taylor written permission to take their children on the trip.

But education officials told reporters that Taylor had failed to seek permission from Stuyvesant’s principal, Stanley Teitel. The special commissioner of investigation for the school district, Richard J. Condon, opened a separate investigation, his spokeswoman said. Under city regulations, all school trips must be approved in advance by the principal.

A lawyer for Taylor, Bernard Kleinman, said she had notified the school of the trip, had followed procedures and had acted in the scope of her employment. Those procedures had never included informing the principal, Kleinman said.

Piro remains paralyzed, in treatment at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in Manhattan. Hsiao also wears a halo.

“Both of the girls have the utmost respect for Erin Taylor,” Eisenberg said. “This is a human tragedy on all levels.”

Taylor said she keeps in touch with Piro and Hsiao. “I just try to be there for them,” she said.

Since the crash, many other students have called Taylor for advice, visited her home and left balloons in the living room.

“I don’t blame her for anything at all,” said Nina Yang, 18, a senior who was in the van that day. “I just see it as something unfortunate that happened. In the end, I feel closer to her.”

Yang, who competed in a race the next day, spoke of Taylor’s effort to recover in time for the Olympic trials in July in Oregon as an inspiration.

“She’s probably the hardest-working person I know,” Yang said. “I’ve never seen anyone with the kind of passion she has.”

Taylor said she could not discuss the crash. But her father said: “Erin adores those kids like they were her own. It just goes without saying that if she could absorb all the pain and suffering onto herself, she would do it without hesitating.”

Trust Transcending Sports

Raised an only child in Clackamas, Ore., Taylor was a junior national racewalking champion by age 16.

“Not once did her mother or I ever have to remind her to practice,” said Larry Taylor, a retired firefighter. “She’s always been self-motivating in everything she’s done.”

After a year of college on the West Coast, Taylor transferred to Rutgers to follow a passion for music. She studied double-reed woodwinds, taking two bachelor’s degrees in May 2000. By the time she resumed her athletic training, joining a team based in Central Park, she cut a less dazzling figure.

“She’s not exactly what we’d call a star, but she’s been training better recently,” said Stella Cashman, leader of the New York team Park Racewalkers. “She dropped off for a while. Real life took over.”

After graduation, Taylor paid her bills by playing oboe and bassoon in small orchestras, teaching music and proofreading legal documents. In the winter of 2005, she took a part-time assistant coaching position at Stuyvesant, earning about $80 a practice. She built the team from a few racewalkers to nearly 20 with a mix of hard workouts, endurance training and self-deprecating humor.

“She’s like a teenager in a 30-year-old’s body,” Yang said. “She’s really easy to relate to, but she also knows when to be disciplined.”

With her easy manner and girlish bearing, all light freckles and waist-length pigtails, Taylor won a trust transcending sports.

“She’s one of those coaches who would do anything for her athletes,” said Elisa Lee, a 2006 graduate who attends Wellesley College. “I could tell she was someone I could talk to about any of my problems.”

Taylor’s coaching philosophy acknowledged the nature of racewalking, a test of stamina and concentration against distance and monotony. Strict rules require constant contact with the pavement and forbid bending an advancing knee. The resulting form appears as some grim Mother May I, a slow trot turned sidelong on the anatomy of human hips.

“Very few if any of these girls are going to go to the Olympics,” Taylor said. “My goal for them isn’t just to win, win, win. I want to teach them how to be healthy.”

In 2006, Taylor intensified her training, setting the Beijing Olympics as a goal. She hired Tim Seaman, a record-holder and an Olympian, to coach her by telephone from California. She worked out 11 times a week, sending heart rate data and pacing information to Seaman.

To qualify for the Olympic trials, Taylor must complete a 20-kilometer race in 1 hour 48 minutes, a pace of about 6.8 m.p.h. In a show of confidence, she booked a hotel room long in advance of the trials.

But last May, Taylor finished a race four minutes too slow to qualify for that competition. At the national championships in Indianapolis in June, she was disqualified on form. And in August, she walked a 15-kilometer race, keeping the right pace but competing in an event that ended five kilometers short of the Olympic distance.

“I knew I would have qualified that day,” Taylor said. “But we were like, no problem, we’ve got all next year.”

A Long Road Back

The broken cervical and thoracic vertebrae inside Taylor’s back — C1, C3 through C7, T2 and T3 — trace a trail from the head to the heart.

On a Wednesday morning in February, hard rain fell on the house she shares here with her boyfriend, Ed McKeon. Taylor had a radiology appointment to make, and McKeon found a raincoat to pull over the halo. The basement was flooding.

“Is there anything I can do?” Taylor asked.

“I don’t think so,” McKeon said on his way down the stairs.

Taylor looked out on the rain.

“I feel so useless all the time,” she said.

When she returned from the appointment, Taylor descended to the basement, now dry. A bare bulb shined on bicycles, a medicine ball, a punching bag. She climbed a stair-stepper and began her daily hour of cardiovascular exercise.

As the weeks of recovery have turned to months, Taylor has hired a new coach and extended her routine, planning to shock her body into shape with shorter and harder workouts.

She has petitioned her health insurer for more time with her physical therapist, Kevin Whelan. The halo is set to remain in place until April 7. Taylor’s next chance to qualify for the Olympic trials is in June.

Some nights, she wonders: “What if I don’t make it? What if I put my life on hold for five years and didn’t make it? What will people say? People won’t understand if I tried to make it and I couldn’t.”

As a workout ended this month, Whelan stood over Taylor, stretching her legs. From framed portraits, Mickey Mantle and Rocky Marciano looked on. From the radio, Bon Jovi sang of loving this town. From the stretching table, Taylor spoke of her plans beyond the track.

“You’ve got too much nervous energy, lady,” Whelan told her.

Taylor laughed. She looked up through the halo’s bars and asked, “Would you rather I sit around and do nothing?”