A personal quest
How one Sun Run InTraining leader overcame a brain injury.
When Kelly Kochut suffered brain trauma after a fall down some stairs in 2010, she faced multiple challenges, including short-term memory loss, anxiety in crowds, the inability to count to 10 and loss of emotion.
She was also diagnosed with a rare speech disorder called foreign accent syndrome, which causes her to speak with various accents from around the world.
“Some days I would be Russian, British, Irish, Australian, I even had a Chinese accent one time,” she said, laughing, and with the cadence of a southern American drawl. “My husband always jokes that he doesn’t know who he’ll wake up with in the morning.”
Despite the obstacles she’s had to overcome since her accident, the 58-year-old Vancouver Sun In Training leader has completed several Vancouver Sun Runs and three half-marathons.
She also has no sense of time, which could be a problem for someone leading a group of runners on a training session. But her husband bought her a GPS watch and programs it before each run.
“I just listen for the beeps, otherwise God knows where we would be running to,” she said with a chuckle. “We would be like Forrest Gump and away we go.”
Humour, she said, has seen her through some bleak times. She has suffered from constant headaches, severe panic attacks and she doesn’t remember conversations with her friends.
It’s been a long, ongoing recovery, but Kochut believes that how people deal with major setbacks says a lot about how they deal with life in general.
“People can either crumble and go into a deep depression when something like this happens or you can just pick yourself up and say, ‘a higher power has made me go down this road for a reason and I am now going down with my head held high.’ ”
When the accident happened, Kochut was taking courses to be a personal trainer, preparing for something to keep her busy during her eventual retirement. But she was trying to do too many things in too little time, she said. Then one day her hectic lifestyle caught up with her as she ran to catch a bus from a Sky Train station.
She slid down 25 stairs. Bleeding and disoriented, she kept going, trying to get to her next class. But she knew something was wrong. Doctors would later explain that the trauma to her brain was similar to shaken baby syndrome.
“I was a really outgoing person. Totally in charge of my life, and all of a sudden I was afraid to be around other people. My doctor said since I was interested in exercise, I should join a group at the Steveston community centre. So they put me on a spin bike so I would have to socialize with other participants.”
From there, she began meeting people and joined a Sun Run clinic in 2011, and participants noticed Kochut was a natural motivator and coach. So clinic coordinator Donna Bishop asked her to be a leader.
Last year, she was named In Training Leader of the Year by Sport Med BC.