Patricia Collins

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Shortly after returning home from a deployment in Iraq, U.S. Army Colonel Patricia Collins was struck by a car while riding her bicycle. Within a year, she made the decision to have her damaged left leg amputated below the knee.

Photography: 
Jim Stroup

Six weeks after U.S. Army Colonel Patricia Collins returned home from a deployment in Iraq, she was struck by a car while riding her bicycle to work at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. Ten grueling months later, at the age of 38, she made the decision to have her damaged left leg amputated below the knee. At the time, Collins LC’91 was mainly concerned with learning to walk with a prosthetic leg. Breaking a world record in the triathlon was not exactly a top priority.

But when Collins completed the Intermedix Ironman 70.3 in Augusta, Georgia, last September—having swum 1.2 miles, bicycled 56 miles, and run 13.1 miles—in five hours, 32 minutes, and 41 seconds, she smashed the existing world record for a female unilateral amputee by three and a half minutes.

“When I came around the final corner and I saw the clock, it was pretty surreal,” Collins says. “Everything just kind of got quiet—the noise, the cheering.”

It was a long road to recovery, but Collins covered it quickly. Four months after the amputation, she adopted Gabe, a Guatemalan boy who is now almost 7. In 2008, almost a year to the day after her amputation, she ran her first 5-kilometer race. In 2009, she shipped out to Afghanistan for a 10-month deployment, helping to run communications systems during the U.S. military buildup. Along the way, coping with her injury gave her some profound insights.

“Losing my leg has been the best thing that ever happened to me,” Collins says. “It makes you take stock of things that are really important to you. It opened my eyes to a whole new world of physically challenged people.”

These days Collins lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and works at the Pentagon. She has her sights set on competing in the 2016 Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Meanwhile, weather permitting, she still commutes to work by bicycle. Nine miles. Each way.