This Guy Broke 20 Bones in a Skydiving Accident. Now He's Doing Triathlons.
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Jason Dennen, 48, is an operations manager in the financial services industry who not only survived a serious skydiving accident, he came back from nearly a year of rehab—which included warnings that he wouldn't ever be able to run—and is now doing triathlons. He's the author of 8 Days Till Sunrise and here, tells the story of getting from seriously injured to triathlon finish line.
In 2018, I was in a freak skydiving accident that almost took my life. (More on that later.) Five years before the accident, my life felt like I was handcuffed to a treadmill forcing me to run at sprint speed all the time. Either I sprinted or would get dragged on the belt spinning beneath my feet. The belt never stopped or slowed down.
It started when I took a new job. After years of working hard, I was finally seeing that hard work paying off with a bump up the corporate ladder—but no one warned me the job I was about to take would take over my life with 12- to 14-hour days, I could barely keep my head above water.
In those five years, I went from being one of the fittest 1 percent of people on the planet (I was an endurance athlete and had completed multiple Ironman triathlons) to seeing my health slowly deteriorate. I completely stopped training and lost endurance sports as my escape and stress reliever. I started to use food as that small happy time each day to eat whatever I wanted to help me get through another exhausting day.
A few years into the job, I decided to get a physical and my bloodwork done because I knew my health was not what it previously was. I had put on 30 pounds and my blood tests revealed I was pre-diabetic and had prehypertension. I stared at my test results and instantly remembered the stories my mom had told me about all of the men in their 40s in our family that had died when she was a child from sudden heart attacks. Was this going to be my fate? Would I be happy if my life ended like this?
One weekend I was on a (rare) bike ride and rode past a small airport where I saw parachutes in the air of people skydiving. About nine years earlier, I had done a tandem skydive attached to an instructor for the once-in-a-lifetime experience of jumping out of an airplane. That day, looking up from my bike, I thought, I could get into this. And I did. I decided I wanted to skydive with all of the responsibility on my shoulders without an instructor attached to me. I completed the training program to get a skydiving license and jump on my own.
The Crash
I headed to the airport mid-morning one day in 2018 for a few jumps on an ordinary Saturday. I jumped twice that day without incident. On my third jump of the day, I was coming in for a landing and was 150 feet off the ground when a huge wind gust hit me from behind and picked me up in my harness and slammed me violently forward. Five seconds before I was going to land, I saw a cattle fence and airplane hangar quickly approaching.
I hit the cattle fence and the wire strands tightened around my chest and stomach, snapping immediately. Within a second, I hit the airplane hangar that was located 10 feet behind the fence going 30 mph. I blacked out when I impacted the building. I hit so hard on my left side that 10 of my 12 ribs broke and impacted my heart so violently that my heart was shot from the left side of my body to the right side.
I was airlifted to the nearest level-one trauma center via a flight for life helicopter for emergency life-saving surgery. The doctors couldn’t believe I lived. They had never performed the surgery I needed; no previous patient had made it into the hospital alive with the heart injury that I sustained. After they fixed my heart over the next 8 days, they kept me in a coma to protect me from my injuries and performed numerous surgeries to fix the 20 bones that I broke and 4 organs that I injured in the crash.
The Push For a Comeback
I spent 8 days in a coma, 14 weeks in the hospital, and had 11 months of rehabilitation. I struggled with panic attacks and depression, but knew I needed to hit bottom and feel uncomfortable and completely unsatisfied with my current situation before I was going to build myself back up again and come back. After 9 weeks, I was told I wouldn’t walk out of the hospital—I’d be leaving in a wheelchair. Five weeks later, I walked out of the hospital with the assistance of crutches.
When my doctor told me I would not likely ever run again, I signed up for a triathlon to prove his prognosis was incorrect and to show all of the people that helped me in my recovery that miracles do happen and you must have faith and be willing to push yourself beyond what a normal person would consider pushing themselves if I was going to make the extraordinary comeback I was expecting to make.
One day short of the 1-year anniversary of the accident I lined up and raced a triathlon and finished it within the time cutoff with no special exceptions, in a driving rainstorm in the worst conditions I have ever raced in while hearing that doctor's voice in the back of my head all day saying, "you will probably never run again." I ran that day for the entire 6.2-mile distance of the running segment of the race after first swimming 1500 meters and biking 30 miles.
How I Got to the Triathlon Starting Line
I was starting from basically no fitness because of all my injuries. I had spent 3 months in a bed, had to relearn to walk, rebuild my strength and try to run again, as well as contend with additional surgeries after I left the hospital. I decided to do an Olympic-distance triathlon (1500-meter swim, 30-mile bike and 10K run) 3 months ahead of the actual race with the goal of finishing in the time cutoff.
Building back the swim: The week before I decided to race, I had been cleared to swim after my latest elbow surgery. I eased into it by swimming for 10 minutes each session, 4 times a week. I added 5 minutes to the workout each week, eventually building up to 45 minutes each session. In each workout, I would try to swim a little further without stopping.
Bringing back the bike: I’d ride four times a week, starting with 45-minute rides at a pace that would allow me to finish the ride. I built up to riding for an hour 3 days a week; the fourth day would be a 2-and-a half-hour ride. I gradually added in hills on the long ride to prepare for the course I’d be riding in the race.
Working into the run: I started with three days a week. I’d have to walk for 20 minutes and then run for 10 before my body loosened up. My longest run before the race was a little over an hour. My running was extremely slow and I had to make sure I wasn’t putting too much pounding on my pelvis, which had been broken in 2 places and now had 2 metal rods and multiple screws holding it together.
What Triathlon Taught Me About Getting Through it All
You can say that triathlon helped save my life and guided my recovery.
• Accomplishing difficult things like training for and finishing races introduced me to how to overcome difficult obstacles. And overcoming difficult obstacles prepared me to overcome even more difficult obstacles like my skydiving accident.
• Triathlons gave me confidence that if I could get through some of those tough races, I could get through anything that I needed to get through. It instilled a mentality of pushing myself to my absolute limit and was the same mentality I used to survive the crash and to push through the recovery each day.
• Recovering was just like training for a race—there were going to be days that I doubted myself and how I was going to complete the race, and those were the days I had to push through to get to those days where I made huge breakthroughs that allowed me to see a view into the bright future that was ahead if I kept pushing each day toward my eventual goal.
Discovering What You’re Capable Of
Racing triathlons post-skydiving accident allows me to see how far I have come from laying in that hospital bed and not being able to move. It is a test of my progress. It is a confirmation that my body is still working. It is a way to encourage myself to continue to push my body past its current limits and see what I am capable of.
I am on a mission to inspire people by sharing my story of survival and to empower people to get through life’s most difficult hardships by utilizing the lessons they have already learned throughout their lives and by taking advantage of the strength they already possess inside themselves.
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