JODY Barber had only just arrived in Australia that day when she made the fateful decision to go for a bike ride on one of Canberra's busy roads.
Barber was on her first overseas trip to represent Canada at the world long-course triathlon championship and wanted to stretch her legs after the long flight.
Check out some of the action from the Games in this YouTube video
'We flew into Sydney that morning on the 14th of November [2006] and took the bus to Canberra, headed over to a friend's house and set up our bikes and about 5pm went out for that ride that day and 20 minutes into it I got run over,'' Barber told the Herald this week in Whistler after coming seventh in the women's standing 12.5-kilometre biathlon at the Vancouver Paralympic Games.
Watch more videos of the 2010 Paralympic Games
http://www.youtube .com/profile?user=vancouverite198 9&annotation_id=annotation_903817 &feature=iv
She was dragged along the road until there was nothing left of her elbow. It was an injury so horrific that Barber was told she would never do triathlon again.
Barber refused to believe that advice for long, but she took to the new sport of cross-country skiing instead, and as the Vancouver Sun newspaper wrote so beautifully: ''Like a bird with a broken wing, the 45-year-old Smithers high school teacher and mother of five has learned to fly on skis.''
The biathlon combines cross-country skiing with shooting. ''I had a great race,'' said Barber, who can only hold a ski pole in her left hand. ''I was happy with how I paced my race, happy with my skiing, happy with my shooting. I'm so excited with all the people cheering for me. It's an honour to represent your country anywhere, but to do it here and have all this support, it's quite overwhelming. Sometimes I get all teary.''
Of being dragged by that car, Barber can remember nothing. ''We were on an on-ramp onto the road and there was a ledge in the pavement I tried to get over and I lost control and I started to fall and I heard someone slamming their brakes behind me and I thought _ because our race was five days away _ 'Oh great, I'm going to have road rash for my race'. We were all trained up for a 4km swim, 125km bike, 30km run. So down I went and then there's probably 15 seconds I have no memory of but I landed in front of the car and she was breaking and she dragged me along ... and ground off most of my elbow and shredded my forearm. I did this quick scan of my body and I saw my right arm and I thought, 'Holy ... I'd better not look at that again because there was muscles and bone and just stuff you should not be seeing'.
''When I got to the hospital they thought they would have to amputate my arm, but they didn't tell me that. After five hours I went into surgery and they put a big metal external fixator on and screwed it into all the bones and bandaged me up. Two weeks later, for my fifth surgery, they reconstructed the soft tissue of my arm with my right lat and some skin grafting from my thigh. I have a scar from the front of my right armpit down to my spine. They took probably an eight-centimetre wide slot of my lat out, with skin on it, and transplanted it onto my arm.''
Although she was told that she would never swim again and never ride a bike again, Barber is back doing both and hopes to do her first short triathlon since the accident this northern summer. ''It's a sport I love.''
Barber says of sport: ''I always hope people will find some activity they love because when we love something we want to keep doing it and it's so important to stay fit, be healthy. You just don't know how that will benefit you. I maintain I still wouldn't have my arm if I hadn't been doing those really boring 5km swims in preparation for that race. My arm can't do a lot, but I'm happy to still have it.''
Barber's favourite saying is: ''Life is 10 per cent what happens to you and 90 per cent how you respond to it.''
Her advice to friends is: ''When you're going to Australia, don't take your bike.''
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