Runner conquers muscle disease
Marathons are part of his life again after serious illness stopped him in his tracks.

By FRANK TANKARD
The Kansas City Star

Vince Kane had come back, but he hadn’t pushed his body to the edge.

It was last October, Chicago Marathon time. More than six years had passed since Kane’s immune system had started turning his muscles to mush.

He had first wasted away to the point that he couldn’t twist the lid off a pop bottle. Then he had come back slowly, through months of training that started with struggling to lift two-pound dumbbells and exhausting himself with 30-second runs. He had built back up to 70-mile weeks.

He had pushed himself too hard, relapsed and come back again.

He proved his doctor wrong by running in several marathons, but he held back. Part of him had been afraid of how his body would respond.

Kane, 27, of Overland Park, first started feeling the effects of dermatomyositis, an inflammatory muscle disease, in 2000. He was a sophomore at Johnson County Community College, a distance runner out of St. Thomas Aquinas High School. His 10K time had fallen behind where it had been the year before, even though he should have been in better shape.

“The guys I was around on the team were running a minute faster than they had the year before,” said Kane, who works as a sales representative with a software company. “I was running a minute slower.”

In the fall he transferred to the University of Kansas. He had once hoped to join the track team, but he was growing weak and thin and couldn’t run. On Thanksgiving break, he went to a clinic. Probably mono, he was told.

On the first day of the spring semester, he couldn’t walk up the hill to class. He couldn’t even turn his wrist to start his car. He went to KU Medical Center and had a muscle biopsy. His mother, Nancy Kane, said his muscles, instead of looking like meat, were all air and bubbles.

A doctor diagnosed him with dermatomyositis.  The disease was causing his immune system to bread down his muscle cells.

About 1 in 100,000 people contract the disease, according to the American College of Rheumatology. Women are twice as likely to get it as men, and it most commonly strikes people in the 40 to 50 age range. Kane’s chances of developing the disease at age 20 were Powerball thin.

Kane’s mother asked his doctor if Kane would run again. Yes, the doctor said, but he wouldn’t have the strength to run competitively. When the doctor left the room, she started crying.

"Mom, don't cry," she recalled her son saying, "because I am going to run a marathon."

The next several months were slow and tedious. He took a semester off from KU. He took medicine to suppress his immune system, which gave him a puffy appearance. He went to a rehabilitation center, spending time in the swimming pool and doing light exercises. He soon started supplementing his therapy regimen by working out at a fitness center in Overland Park. He started by lifting two-pound dumbbells and running the short straightaway of the indoor track.

He attracted plenty of raised eyebrows. Outwardly, he looked healthy.

“No one was mean,” he said, “but people would just kind of look at you funny.”

He re-enrolled at KU and started running nearly every day with Erin Leary, a KU freshman with whom he had run cross country in high school. Leary wasn’t in great shape when they started their training, so they worked together, going from 12-minute jogs to running more than an hour together by the spring.

They ran the Chicago Marathon together in the fall. Kane felt good and elevated his training to 70-plus miles a week. One week he ran 92 miles. But when he started tapering his training for another go at the Chicago Marathon, he didn’t feel right. He developed rashes on his face, chest and elbows, a sign that dermatomyositis was back.

He ignored the symptoms and traveled to Chicago for the race.

“And it was the hardest thing I ever did in my life,” he said. “By the end, I felt like if the wind blew too hard and I got knocked over that I wasn’t going to get up.”

He managed to finish the race, then took things easy for several months.

He took pills and his symptoms went away. But his spirit was crushed. Running is about testing your limits. And now, it seemed, he couldn’t push himself as far as he would like.

“That was probably the hardest part,” he said, “running that marathon and then realizing that I wasn’t invincible by any means. I was going to have to respect the disease, because it could definitely come back.”

Training smarter, with no 92-mile weeks, he continued to run marathons. With each race he got faster: 3:16, 3:07, 3:02. But his one-time goal — two hours, 40 minutes — seemed to melt away. He couldn’t train hard enough to get there. Even during races, part of him knew he wasn’t pushing himself as hard as he used to.

Then, last fall in Chicago, the hammer fell.

His time was only two minutes faster than what he had run in the Boston Marathon in the spring, and mere seconds from breaking the three-hour barrier. But, for the first time since he got the disease, he hadn’t held back.

“The last 100 meters I was gagging and dry-heaving and puking,” he said. “So I knew that I absolutely had left it all out there.”

After the race, no signs of the disease resurfaced.

Kane ran the Lawrence Half Marathon on Sunday, finishing in one hour, 30 minutes. He plans to enter either the New York City or Chicago marathon in the fall.

He wants to break three hours, and after that, maybe do half-ironman competitions, consisting of swimming, biking and running. Like everyone he races against, he’ll be pushing himself — but with limits.

“I just had to make a compromise: ‘Hey, you’re not going to do those things that you wanted to do however many years ago,’” he said. “‘You can still do things that a lot of people can’t do.’”

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