att Miller was the top overall finisher at the Dottie’s House End of Season Triathlon, a small sprint race Sept. 29
in Seaside Park, New Jersey. That might sound like a modest ac-
complishment in the triathlon world. Then again, Miller is a busy third-year medical school student at the University of Penn- sylvania who manages to squeeze in just four hours of training a week, rarely swim- ming more than a total of 15 minutes. He’s also just four years removed from a
horrific bicycle accident where he suffered severe brain trauma, broke every bone in his face and essentially lost all of his teeth.
Miller’s remarkable comeback is chron-
icled in the recent book “The Road Back: A Journey of Grace and Grit,” written by Michael Vitez, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Miller, now 24, was a junior at the Uni-
versity of Virginia in November of 2008, a former Cavaliers swimmer turned triath- lete. While cycling along the Blue Ridge Parkway near Charlottesville, he collided with an oncoming Porsche, smashing into the vehicle with his face. Remarkably, the first person on the
scene was an anesthesiologist, who knew how to position his head. That was the first of a series of fortunate circumstances that got him alive to the University of
Virginia hospital, where doctors gave him little chance of surviving 72 hours, at least without permanent brain damage. Instead, Miller walked out of the hos-
pital in 25 days, scored a 95 on a makeup physics exam with a class average of 65, and in the fall of 2010 completed Ironman Cozumel in a top 10 percent time of 10:30 — during his first semester of medical school, no less. It was a long way from the three
days following the accident, as Vitez chronicles in The Road Back. Miller’s family wondered whether he’d survive. His girlfriend, Emily, kept a bedside vigil even as her boyfriend’s mangled face was unrecognizable.
Continued on page 36 ROAD BACK MATT MILLER’S USATRIATHLON.ORG USA TRIATHLON 35