(02/18/2010) On Saturday, just a little over two months after a 330-gallon fuel oil tank he and his father had been carrying down basement stairs landed on him and pinned him, lacerating his liver and causing other
 Jack Graves
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life-threatening internal injuries, from which, initially, he was given little chance of overcoming, Jim MacWhinnie, in the company of his 7-year-old niece, Briana, cheered on the 45 runners who turned out that morning at Southampton’s Red Creek Park for the Jim Mac Valentine’s 4K.
Proceeds from the 2-mile snowy trail run, put on by Bob Beattie, with whom the 37-year-old personal trainer and triathlete once worked at a Gubbins Running Ahead store, went to an account in MacWhinnie’s name at Hamptons State Bank earmarked to pay his medical bills. Besides Beattie’s Island Timing, other sponsors were Core Dynamics, the Water Mill gym where MacWhinnie had been working when the accident occurred, Body Tech Fitness, and the Old Montauk Athletic Club.
The sponsors’ names were on the “Strength For Life” T-shirt the runners wore, as was “B Positive,” MacWhinnie’s blood type. Jim’s sister, Karen, who works in the Southampton Intermediate School’s library, said a sixth grader, Alex Ambrose, had written — rather serendipitously, as it turned out — “B Positive” on a get-well card. The stricken personal trainer-triathlete received 100 transfused pints of B positive blood during his ordeal.
Her brother’s recovery [he said he expects to be running competitively by early summer] had indeed been a miracle, a string of miracles really, Karen said. “They said he had a 10 percent chance of survival. He’s
The honoree is well on his way to a 100-percent recovery.
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going to make a 100 percent recovery.”
Following a lifesaving procedure performed by an emergency medical technician at the house and a subsequent lifesaving operation at Southampton Hospital, MacWhinnie spent 17 days at Stony Brook University Medical Center, where he underwent four more surgeries.
“Each time, the surgeons told us to keep praying,” said Karen. She, her brother Charlie, her father, Chuck, and her mother, Linda, “spent the first 10 days sleeping on the waiting room floor at the hospital. After that, we stayed in a hotel down the road with each of us taking turns staying with him for part of the day.”
If anything good could be said to have come out of “this horrible tragedy,” she said, it was that she was running now. “I’d never run in my life — I started in January. I’ve never felt better. This is my first official run. . . . I told your reporter when it happened that I’d made a vow that I would run with him. Well, we did on treadmills at Core Dynamics the other day.”
Beattie told everyone that they should probably tread lightly in the woods. He’d checked out Red Creek’s trails at dawn and had found them to be covered in “virgin snow, about a foot deep in some spots.”
Nevertheless, Jason Hancock, a teacher at the Amagansett School who has trained with MacWhinnie for Iron Man triathlons, marathons, and 10Ks, gave it his all. He had done so to honor his friend, he said on emerging from the pines, way ahead of the field.
“He’s so far ahead of schedule — it’s unbelievable when you consider he almost died,” the winner said. “He’s already at the gym doing workouts. He’s an inspiration.”
To which Mike Bahel, Body Tech’s owner, added, “He did two miles in 20 minutes on the treadmill at Core Dynamics the other day. That’s better than 80 percent of the people in the world.”
Dennis Fabiszak, the executive director of the East Hampton Library and a Hamptons Running Club teammate of MacWhinnie’s and Hancock’s, who is among those planning a large Memorial Day race fund-raiser, said, “It’s been great seeing him at the gym. Seeing what he’s doing has people really working hard.”
Fabiszak had planned to use his Over The Hills and Through the Woods trail race at the Southampton Recreation Center on Feb. 7 as a fund-raiser for MacWhinnie, but icy trails caused a postponement. “It won’t be snowing on Memorial Day — I guarantee it,” he said.
As for himself, MacWhinnie, who was “feeling good,” agreed, when questioned, that it had been “quite an experience, though one I’d rather not have had. . . . Sixty percent of my liver was removed. But it grows back. I walked with a walker when I got out of the hospital, but I was very weak and out of breath. I’ve been rehabbing a few times a week with Sinead [FitzGibbon of Manual and Sports Physical Therapy]. I lost 30 pounds, but I’ve gained 10 back. I’ve been progressing very well, especially in the last few weeks. I’ve even done a bit of jogging,” he said with a smile. “I hope to be competing again in the summer, maybe at the beginning of the summer.”
“This has been a love-fest,” said Kevin Barry, East Hampton High’s boys cross-country coach, once he’d finished the loop. “We should have had Jim stand at the starting line. Then we could beat him for once. That will all change in May.”