Iron Heart: The True Story of How I Came Back from the Dead

It was a horrific car crash. On the way home from swim practice, eighteen-year old Brian Boyle's future changed in an instant when a dump truck plowed into his Camaro. He was airlifted to a shock-trauma hospital. He had lost sixty percent of his blood, his heart had moved across his chest, and his organs and pelvis were pulverized. He was placed in a medically-induced coma. When Brian finally emerged from the coma two months later, he had no memory of the accident. He could see and hear, but not move or talk. Unable to communicate to his doctors, nurses, or frantic parents, he heard words like "vegetable" and "nursing home." If he lived, doctors predicted he might not be able to walk again, and certainly not swim. Then, miraculously, Brian clawed his way back to the living. First blinking his eyelids, then squeezing a hand, then smiling, he gradually emerged from his locked-in state. The former swimmer and bodybuilder had lost one hundred pounds.

Iron Heart is the first-person account of his ordeal and his miraculous comeback. With enormous fortitude he learned to walk, then run, and eventually, to swim. With his dream of competing in the Ironman Triathlon spurring him on, Brian defied all odds, and three-and-a-half years after his accident, crossed the finish line in Kona, Hawaii. Brian's inspiring journey from coma to Kona is brought to life in this memoir.

"Not since Lance Armstrong has an American athlete been so celebrated for dodging death and competing again."--Washington Post

The inspiring true story of Brian Boyle's near death in a car crash to his running the Ironman Triathlon.

It was a terrible car crash, and during the months Brian Boyle lay in a medically induced coma, his body convulsed whenever his parents spoke. He remembers finally waking up from the coma, unable to speak or move, watching his doctors huddled with his parents in the corner of the hospital room. They didn"t know it, but he could hear them. He heard the words 'vegetable' and 'hospital for life.' He saw tubes everywhere'"down his throat, in his chest, in his arms, on his neck. He couldn"t move any part of his body, couldn"t blink his eyelids. He couldn"t ask why he was paralyzed. He only knew that he was in a hospital and that he was scared.

Later, this 5-foot-11, 230-pound athlete turned 130-pound skeleton, sat in his wheelchair, staring at his immovable legs, willing death to come. For almost two years, survival seemed impossible. . . until the dream of an Ironman triathlon brought twenty-three-year-old Brian Boyle back to life. From learning how to walk again to becoming an Ironman, Brian"s ordeal and triumph are brought to life in his inspiring memoir: Iron Heart.

Brian Boyle suffered a near fatal car accident when he was eighteen. A former swimmer and bodybuilder, he had become a human skeleton but became determined to compete in the Hawaii Ironman. In October of 2007, he realized his goal and crossed the finish line in Kona. NBC television covered him during the triathlon. In 2008, Men's Health magazine named Boyle one of its twenty heroes. He's currently a student at St. Mary's College in Maryland.Bill Katovsky is editor, author, and coauthor of several books, including Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, which won Harvard's Goldsmith Book Prize. He's finished the Hawaii Ironman twice and is founder of Triathlete Magazine. He lives in Northern California.