Twenty-five years ago, Martin Quinn ’03 was a first-year student at CC. He had just completed his first season as a member of the Men’s Soccer team under head coach Horst Richardson, and woke up on a Friday morning, ready for a mid-block accounting exam, preparing for the upcoming Block Break. But life had different plans.
“I woke up that morning and had this terrible, terrible, headache,” says Quinn. “I took five or six Advil – I’m a kid from Ireland so I didn’t know what Advil was – and went and took my exam. Then later that day, I went up to Denver with some friends and we were going to go up to the mountains the next day. But I just had continued headaches.”
As the night went on, the pain got worse. He was no longer able to go to the bathroom and he couldn’t fall asleep. “So, I ended up going to Boettcher around midnight that night and then the next thing I remember is waking up five days later at Penrose.”
Quinn had fallen into a coma that night and awoke at the hospital nearly a week later, his parents next to his bed, his body paralyzed from the waist down.
For weeks, Quinn and his family didn’t know what was wrong. Blood samples were shipped to the Mayo Clinic and, eventually, Dr. Tom Hackenberg, an infectious disease doctor from Colorado Springs, was able to determine that Quinn had suffered a viral infection in his spine and figured out the right treatment. Still, the prognosis wasn’t good. Doctors told Quinn that there was only about a seven percent chance that he would ever walk again.
His response: Watch me.
Three and a half weeks later, he moved his big toe.
Quinn glows remembering the support he received from friends and family during his recovery journey. And two members of the CC community rise above the rest: Horst and Helen Richardson.
“I’d met Horst Richardson over the summer in Germany. He actually came to my house to kind of convince me that CC was the place to go. Everything that happened after I got sick was just so Colorado College, you know. The community really rallied behind me. Helen came every single day to the hospital. Horst and Helen were like my second parents and were there the whole time. Then the Women’s Soccer coach at the time, Greg Ryan, he brought a TV and all these videos and just anything to raise my spirits. I had professors come by. The dean came by. It endeared the college to me, even more than it already had.”
Quinn spent a month and a half at Penrose and then returned home to Ireland for the rest of the summer to recover. Not only did Quinn walk again, but he didn’t miss a single game of the following soccer season, scoring the game-winning goal for CC in his first match back.
After graduation, Quinn moved back to Europe, working for Microsoft and playing semi-professional soccer before going on to business school. The former Economics major now lives in the Bay Area of California, working as Commercial VP at a gene therapy startup company. But with the fullness of adult life came less time for team sports.
“Running just came naturally because you don’t have to rely on anyone else,” says Quinn. His family has a history of running marathons, with some of Quinn’s earliest memories being his parents running in the Dublin Marathon. “And so, I ran my first marathon in 2007.”
Since then, Quinn has run multiple marathons, triathlons, Ironmans, and ultra marathons.
“You kind of put these things that happened to you in this in this drawer as ‘that was something bad that happened to me. I’m not ever going to think about it again’,” says Quinn. “But as you get older and you mature, you start thinking about what could have been and you get a little bit more pensive and appreciative of the opportunities that you have. If I had remained paralyzed, life would have been so different. I don’t know if I would have been able to have the wonderful family, especially three kids, that I have today. I definitely wouldn’t be living in America. I likely would have just moved home and taken it from there. That’s when I was like, okay, I’m running all these marathons. I should really start giving back a little bit.”
And now, two and a half decades after being told he would probably never walk again, Quinn is running the Boston Marathon, for the second time, raising money for the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation.
“It’s the foundation that I and my family would have had to use with all of these resources that they provide,” says Quinn. “I would have been really interested in the research that they do to help people, not necessarily to walk again but to gain more function. And so, I ran the New York marathon for them in 2021 and got much more connected with the foundation. I met people that are dealing with spinal cord injuries and paralysis today and they’ve become friends and people I admire. So, when the foundation got spots for Boston, they called me and asked me whether I would raise money by running the Boston Marathon for them.” It was an immediate “yes.”
And the story has grown from there. When Bank of America, one of the Boston Marathon sponsors, heard about Quinn’s story, they asked to highlight him as one of their featured runners. The company also heard that, in 2011, Quinn ran the Dublin Marathon with his dad as part of the family tradition. So, they offered his dad a spot in the Boston Marathon as well, so that the father and son pair could do it again.
“He’s going to run Boston with me,” says Quinn. “That will be really special. It will be his last marathon. He’s turning 70 in May.”
Quinn is grateful for his time at CC and all the people who helped him on his journey. To support him in this next running adventure, please consider donating to his Boston Marathon run for the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation.