Hood to Coast Relay turns into race for recovery
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In a picture on the bulletin board behind Dan Gjelten’s desk, a man and woman stand in the Pacific surf, wearing race T-shirts and finisher’s medals for the Nike Hood to Coast Relay.
The couple is Gjelten and Lisa Burke, taken a year after their plans to participate in the 197-mile relay were scrapped by a head-on car crash, sending them home with morphine pumps instead of medals.
“This is where we wanted to be in 2006,” Gjelten said, pointing to the picture. “It just took us a year to get there.”
Gjelten and Burke at the finish of the 2007 Hood to Coast Relay.
Putting in the work to get where he wants to be is not anything new for Gjelten. The director of St. Thomas libraries began running in preparation to climb Mount Rainier in 1981, and although he’s since given up mountain climbing, he still runs about 1,000 miles a year and has completed 14 marathons.
After the accident Gjelten, 56, was forced to take a year off from running, and his return, which has been full of starts, stops and psychological barriers, was a step-by-step healing process. Although Gjelten visited doctors and physical therapists more than 50 times in the next year to fix his broken and dislocated clavicle, torn shoulder muscles and broken foot, he credits the St. Thomas community with being a major source of support during his recovery.
“I kept every note people ever sent,” Gjelten said. “You don’t ever really know how tied in you are to a community until you need it.”
Gjelten and his three siblings grew up in north-central Iowa’s Winnebago County with their father, an architect, and their mother, a teacher/librarian. He earned degrees in English and philosophy from Luther College before going to work for Minnesota’s Legislative Reference Library. When he started work Gjelten said he had no practical knowledge about libraries, and that today a lot of people still don’t understand what a librarian really is.
“If you want to work in my library the worst thing you can do is say you want to work there because you like books,” Gjelten said. “This is not a quiet job with a lot of time to read – it’s about engaging people with information needs.”
Engaging people is something Gjelten’s son Arne, a senior at New York University, said his intellectual father excels at.
“He’s reflective and thoughtful, incredibly sensitive and emotionally conscious,” Arne Gjelten said. “He’s passionate and knowledgeable about literature and music.”
After 13 years at the state capitol, Gjelten came to work at St. Thomas in 1991 while pursuing a master’s degree in English. A member of the St. Thomas running club, he organized a team to run the 2006 relay from Oregon’s Mount Hood to the Pacific Ocean. On August 22, three days before the race, Gjelten and Burke were driving the course when a Honda Civic veered across center and struck their rented SUV.
The April 22, 2006 crash site outside Portland.
The couple in the car, both in their 70s, were pronounced dead at the scene.
“When I saw that car I was sure we’d both be killed and it took a long time to realize that we weren’t,” Gjelten said.
After seven days in the hospital trauma center Gjelten was airlifted home. He spent eight days in a nursing home before moving into the handicap-accessible priests’ residence at St. Thomas for five weeks because his house in St. Paul had too many steps for him to get around.
“Even there he was working, doing e-mail, having people over for meetings,” said his boss, Vice President of IRT Samuel Levy. “He’s a great operational leader and a leader with great vision for the information commons.”
By October he was back at work, and on New Year’s Day he was able to run a mile. Then in February 2007, Gjelten went back into the hospital to have his shoulder bones cut apart and a 5-inch titanium plate inserted. In some ways, he said, that setback was worse than the accident.
“I was depressed,” Gjelten said. “I went back to the doctor three or four weeks later and I couldn’t even lift my arm.”
After the doctor told him he would lose all use of his arm if he didn’t start working, Gjelten started taking his therapy seriously. By May had recovered some of its function and trained through the summer using the approaching Hood to Coast Relay as motivation.
That titanium plate and eight screws were removed in January 2008 (although he still has another plate and seven screws) and now sit on Gjelten’s desk at home. In 2007 he also took home the Minnesota Academic Librarian of the Year Award, based on voting from his colleagues.
Although he says his injuries will always be a problem, he’s already registered for another Grandma’s Marathon with the goal of qualifying for the Boston Marathon.
Returning to Oregon in 2007 to finish what they started the year before was an emotional experience that helped Gjelten and Burke piece together that whole frustrating and, in some ways, fortunate, year.
“Whether it is a result of the accident, or simply maturity, we have grown much closer in the past two years,” Arne Gjelten said.
Both Dan Gjelten and his son were deeply affected by the deaths of Gjelten’s parents within the last 10 months. Combined with the accident and his rough recovery, Gjelten said the last 18 months have been a difficult learning experience.
“The lessons I’ve taken from this are not about running, or auto safety, they’re about people and how important they are,” Gjelten said. “Everything – all my relationships – are deeper.”