Patrick Lonsdale has begun swimming two miles at a time and has started to ride his bicycle for the first time in two years as he gears up for the May 2 Wildflower Triathlon along Lake San Antonio near San Miguel.
Such training can be rigorous for any athlete, but for Lonsdale it’s particularly challenging: The 44-year-old Ben Lomond resident lost his left leg following a 2013 skiing accident.
Now, he is on the mend with the help of $17,160 from a Truckee foundation that helps winter sports athletes, including a $7,700 grant last month to pay for an upcoming surgery to replace a knee socket in his prosthetic leg.
“In retrospect, it was the craziest experience my family and I had ever had, but I’m good with it now,” he said last week.
Such positivity might seem unexpected under such circumstances, but it has become a way of life for Lonsdale, who maintains tremendous appreciation for the Truckee-based High Fives Foundation, which has provided him with support.
Lonsdale, a general contractor and former competitive extreme skier who moved to Ben Lomond from Vermont in 1998, was on the slopes at Squaw Valley in January 2013 when he crashed into an inch-and-a-half metal pole, which he expected to be made of bamboo.
The impact of the wreck smashed his bones into 30 pieces and severed his left leg’s main artery. After being transported to the hospital, doctors inserted 12 shish kebab-like skewers into his leg to hold it together.
“It was shattered,” Lonsdale recalled. “My surgeon said it was like I stepped on an IED,” he added, referring to improvised explosive devices that have injured soldiers overseas.
Forty days and 10 surgeries later, doctors determined they would have to amputate when a group of cells were permanently damaged by necrosis — or tissue death — and Lonsdale faced a life-threatening condition known as compartment syndrome.
As expenses began to rack up, Lonsdale received a providential phone call from his friend and mentor, John Egan.
Egan, a pioneer in extreme skiing who has starred in films directed by snow sports filmmaker Warren Miller, had mentored Lonsdale on the slopes of Vermont’s Sugarbush ski resort in the late ’70s.
He knew about High Fives because it was run by another one of his protégés, Roy Tuscany, who started the foundation after he was temporarily paralyzed from the waist down during a ski injury in 2006.
Tuscany has since given away his wheelchair and has taken up skiing again.
“It was all very circular,” Lonsdale said of his connection with the foundation.
Tuscany said that raising support for Lonsdale was like second nature, noting that he and Lonsdale shared “deep ties and deep roots” with their Vermont upbringing and coaching by Egan.
“I just thought it was kind of ironic that (the High Fives Foundation) had just started fundraising on the East Coast when it came time to do fundraising for Patrick,” he said.
Tuscany started the foundation in 2009 as a “pay-it-forward” initiative to help athletes who are seriously injured in winter sports, after he received care and financial support from members of the Truckee community at the time of his own injury.
“I was super lucky in that a whole bunch of people rallied for me after two years of endless rehab,” Tuscany said. “I figured I needed to do more than just write thank-you notes. I knew that not everyone was as lucky as me to have support from a community-based environment.”
Tuscany has gone on to give a TEDx talk on “Positive Chaos: A Way to Transform Your Memories.”
In 2014 alone, his foundation issued $249,000 in grant funding to support 28 High Fives athletes with life-altering injuries and two organizations.
The organization has helped 67 athletes from 18 states, and runs a healing center with therapeutic programs in Truckee along with winter sports safety educational outreach programs for youth.
Egan said this week that he was humbled to have such amazing students as Tuscany and Lonsdale, and happy to see the High Fives Foundation help injured athletes in need.
“I think it’s really incredible,” Egan said. “I think about buddies of mine that got hurt back in the old days, and if someone like Roy and High Fives had been around, how different their lives would have been.”
He recalled how Lonsdale joined his group of “ski bums” after Egan grabbed him and took him along with him one day when Lonsdale was just a boy.
“The kid was such a good skier, and he was amazing,” Egan recalled.
Lonsdale went on to take ninth place overall during the four-day North American Extreme Skiing Championships in Crested Butte Colorado in 1994 and fourth place overall as a skier, snowboarder and telemark skier in Lord of The Boards, a precursor to the X Games. He also appeared in one of Miller’s films as a 12-year-old boy while skiing in Portillo, Chile for a week.
The Ben Lomond resident continues to look to Egan as an inspiration, and hopes to have the opportunity to give back to the High Fives Foundation one day as well.
In the meantime, he is enjoying life with his wife, Megan, and his two children, and looks forward to getting back on the slopes once he receives a specifically adapted ski leg that is expected to cost $18,000.
Lonsdale remains positive, maintaining the motto, “Up or down, it’s up to you.”
“The feeling that I have is that I’m forever in a ski boot,” Lonsdale said. “Considering that I like to ski, it’s not that terrible.”
More information on Lonsdale can be found on his personal website, www.patricksleg.org. For information on High Fives: www.highfivesfoundation.org
