Both Determined to Reach Ultimate Goal : Triathlon: Wheelchair athletes hope to compete someday in difficult Ironman event in Hawaii.

The Ironman Triathlon.

Even in their wildest dreams, most people would never consider competing in this grueling event that taxes the strength and endurance of even the strongest of triathletes.

But most people are not confined to a wheelchair.

“I’m Dr. John Franks, I’m a chiropractor. I broke my back four years ago,” he told a spinal rehabilitation support group at Northridge Hospital. Franks, 32, was paralyzed from the waist down after a motorcycle accident in November 1985.

“I felt my legs just go out,” Franks said in a subsequent interview. “They turned off just like a TV set. You know an old TV set, how you turn it off and the screen just kind of dims out? That’s how my legs felt. There was just a massive tingling that got less and less and less.”

Spinal injuries are not uncommon, but Franks’ reaction to his was. He began to compete against able-bodied athletes in triathlons, even though he had no experience in the sport. “I was lying in bed, and everybody kept coming in; (they) went and searched out some miracle to come in and talk to me, to give me hope,” Franks said. “I wasn’t the one that needed it--everyone else didn’t have any hope. I was unaccepting of the injury. I still am.”

The triathlon is generally considered to be the ultimate test of fitness. The Ironman, which consists of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bicycle race and a 26.2-mile run in Hawaii, is the ultimate triathlon, and Franks envisioned himself competing in it.

“My thoughts were, ‘I’m going to get in the best shape that I’ve ever been in and do something that’s totally ludicrous for the shape that I’ve always been in,’ ” Franks said. “I certainly wasn’t thinking of doing it out of the chair, but the chair didn’t go away. It still hasn’t.”

It wasn’t a matter of simply getting in shape. Disabled athletes must have special wheelchairs made, and Franks has two, one for the run portion of the race and one for cycling. A lack of sponsorship has made it difficult for him to devote as much time as he would like to competition.

Lightweight braces to lock his legs straight and a custom body suit to fit over the braces were necessary to swim, but they didn’t solve his greatest problem. While training in Maui shortly after the accident, Franks discovered that he could no longer swim freestyle.

“I tried to swim, and I got 15 or 20 feet and I almost drowned,” he said. “If you were watching me, it would have looked like a bird with broken wings trying to fly. It looked that bad. It felt that bad.”

Franks, who switched to the backstroke and was so successful that he consistently beats a large percentage of the field in swimming, uses this example to illustrate the determination of Bobby Rohan, whom he met at Northridge Hospital.

Bobby Rohan’s room is like any other teen-ager’s. Posters of his heroes, such as Greg LeMond in his Tour de France victory-clinching ride down the Champs Elysees, fight for space with a stereo system. But Bobby Rohan is not a typical teen-ager. He is a quadriplegic.

While on a training ride in March 1989, Rohan, 18, rode into the back of a parked bus in a bike lane near his West Hills home. Several days later, doctors told him that he would never walk again.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘Boy, I get to miss tomorrow out of school,’ ” Rohan said. “I thought, ‘That can’t be true,’ and that’s the way I felt for about a couple of weeks. When I just started getting up and getting around every day, I kind of settled in and thought, ‘Well, I’ve got to change my life now. Here it goes, give it all you’ve got to your new life.’

“I still planned for triathlons. I said, ‘I’ll start training in the summer lightly, and I’ll do my first triathlon next year.’ ”

Rohan became interested in triathlons in the fall of 1987 after he saw a friend compete in Phoenix.

“I thought, ‘I can do that. I can swim, anyone can ride a bike and anyone can run.’ We got home, and I started training for a triathlon,” Rohan said.

In an average week before his accident, Rohan, who competed in almost 40 triathlons and was a consistent high finisher in his age group, swam nearly 10 miles, cycled between 200 and 300 miles, ran from 25 to 50 miles and also competed on his high school swimming and cross-country teams.

Now, Rohan is dealing with enormous changes in his life, which are difficult for an able-bodied person to imagine.

Instead of training for triathlons, Rohan must practice the little things that came naturally before the accident. Because he has no coordinated hand or finger movement, he has had to relearn how to eat, drink, write, brush his teeth and even scratch his nose.

“Getting up in the morning (was the hardest adjustment),” Rohan said. “(When you’re able-bodied), you get up and take a shower and get dressed and comb your hair and eat breakfast in less than a half an hour, if you want to, before school.

“Now it takes an hour and a half to two hours to get everything done.”

The accident also was difficult for his father.

“You just take it for granted that the kids are going to get up and take care of themselves,” Jim Rohan said. “You get angry. I get mad at Bobby for whatever reason, but I think it’s more mad at myself.

“You sit there and see a kid who had everything going for him, and then there’s a stupid accident? Why?

“You don’t expect things like this.”

Anger accompanies disabling injuries, as both Franks and Rohan discovered.

“I don’t care how positive you are, how tough you are or what, you spend a couple months in the hospital . . . and have people treating you like a piece of meat on a slab, it’ll get to you eventually,” Franks said.

Said Rohan: “The jealousy part is the worst, because you look at everyone and everything, and you get jealous pretty easily about everything. My friends will go out to a place that I can’t go to, or my brother will go out a lot and I can’t go because there’s not enough room with my chair and me.

“It gets frustrating sometimes when you’re in a hurry and you’re trying to get your shirt on and your arms get stuck, and you fall over and you have to ask someone for help. You just can’t walk up and get something out of the refrigerator or out of the cupboard to eat or snack on. If no one’s around, you just have to wait for someone to do that for you.”

The anger can also be productive. Sandra Rudnick, a clinical psychologist who leads the spinal injury support group at Northridge Hospital, said the pre-accident mentality normally associated with athletes--determination, endurance, an achievement-motivated outlook--can be a major factor in their recovery.

Rohan spends eight hours a day in occupational therapy, where he is learning how to function independently and finding an outlet for his competitive nature.

“I’ll be at (therapy) and we’ll be doing a bicycle machine for our arms and I’ll go all out,” Rohan said. “I’ll find myself pushing myself just like I was on the bike.

“I’ll see people do (a hand movement), and I can’t do it yet. That day on the mat, I’ll work on it, (saying,) ‘I’ve got to get it, I’ve got to get it.’ I don’t care how long it takes me.”

Franks also attributes his determination to athletics.

“Bobby’s an athlete, I’m an athlete. We’re both aggressive people. Aggressive people fight. Less aggressive people are more accepting,” Franks said.

When Franks speaks of his injury, it is as a temporary thing. He keeps track of the latest scientific developments in spinal research and gives serious attention to all of them, from cellular regeneration to ideas from the movie, “RoboCop.”

“The key is interfacing human tissue with robotics,” Franks said. “If they did an interface tomorrow, I’d let them amputate my legs.”

Franks’ views may not be as far-fetched as they appear, as a recent conversation with a friend from chiropractic school illustrates.

“She said that she was at a seminar recently where a doctor said that in the next 10 to 15 years there won’t be anyone in wheelchairs anymore,” Franks said. “She called me and she was all excited. She said, ‘He’s saying what you’ve been saying, they’ve gotten some new stuff.’ And I said, ‘I know. There’s no revelation to what he’s saying, he’s just getting on the bandwagon.’ ”

Rohan, who was recently hospitalized again because of a calcium buildup, has a similar, although less radical, outlook--one that he occasionally visualizes at night before falling asleep.

“A lot of times, I’ll just lie there before I fall asleep, and I’ll do the swim part,” Rohan said. “Then I’ll do a bike and then a run and then I’ll cross the finish line. I never stop thinking about that. I’ll probably never stop visualizing it until it happens again.”

Rohan, who is as determined as Franks to do the Ironman, saw Franks again at the 1989 Ironman Triathlon, where were spectators. Franks made his cycling wheelchair available to Rohan, who rode for about a half-mile.

“Words can’t describe it,” Rohan said. “It was so neat that I even got a chance to be back on a bike. Because of that, now I know that some day I’ll be back there competing again.

“I know that I’m going to be out there pretty soon racing him. (Franks) said it himself, he can’t wait until I’m out there racing. I know I’ll be out there racing again, with him or side by side.”