28-year-old Missouri native Michael Bigogno played multiple sports growing up, and went to college on a baseball scholarship.
But right after his junior year in 2012, he borrowed a friend's skateboard and had a bad accident that almost KILLED him. He fell turning a corner . . . the left side of his head hit a CURB . . . and he ended up with a serious blood clot called a subdural hematoma.
Doctors put him in a medically induced coma for two-and-a-half weeks, and had to remove a large section of his SKULL because of the swelling. At that point, they only gave him a 10% chance of surviving.
Once he was out of the woods, he had to do a ton of physical therapy almost every day for several months. And his memory was shot, so he could only remember things for about five minutes at first.
But after about a year, he made a FULL RECOVERY. And check this out. He went back and finished school . . . works as a gym teacher in St. Louis now . . . and just finished his first IRONMAN race about a week-and-a-half ago.
That's where you swim two-and-a-half miles . . . ride a bike 112 miles . . . then run a full 26-mile marathon. He finished in 14 hours and 38 minutes, which was middle-of-the-pack. But obviously the point wasn't to win.
He says he never looks back or asks why it all happened to him. He just keeps moving forward and never takes a single day for granted.
(Runner's World)