For One Runner, Road Race Was A Triumph Over Brain Injury

When Ken McKay got to the flagpole on the green yesterday morning, his friend Janis D'Andrea was there to meet him.

But so were a few others. Looking around, he recognized his friend Bob Sands. And Sal Rap. Hugh Cafferty. Mehgan McManus. Around a dozen others. A whole host of Guilford, Branford and East Haven-based runners who call themselves the Podunk Pounders. They had come to support McKay, to accompany him in the race.

"It was honestly a huge surprise, to see my friends out here, to run with them," he says. "Believe it or not, when i started running 20 years ago, Branford Road Race was the first race I ever ran. So it's kind of a miracle."

It's a miracle because a few years ago Ken McKay was told by doctors he had a 1% chance of survival. In 2009, the former East Haven Town Council member woke up with a burst blood vessel in his brain. Doctors told him he had an AVM, an arteriovenous malformation. He spent a month in a coma. After six months of rehabilitation at Gaylord Special Healthcare in North Haven, he now works at Tremonte Auto Group in Branford and still keeps active in town government, albeit in an unofficial role. But he felt the drive to get back out and run.

"You know, I still worry," he says, referring to the AVM and the long process of healing. "But when I'm out there running, I don't worry at all anymore. I've gotten to the point where I don't think about it. It's the last thing on my mind. It's just a rush to be out there."

McKay finished the five-mile race in about 55 minutes - and his friends in the Podunk Pounders ran alongside him the entire way, barely leaving his side. Sands broke with the group briefly to run ahead and encourage the crowd, "Let's cheer for Ken!" They did, as McKay passed.

"He told me from day one, I'm going to run again one day," laughs D'Andrea. "I just shook my head and said, that's what you think. ... I'll believe it when i see it. And then I thought about it and said, well, that's silly. If he says he's going to do it, of course he's going to do it.

D'Andrea spent the last few weeks training with McKay.

"He never complained. He just said, 'I'm going to get better.' As positive as he was before his illness, he's just as positive now. i think that's why he recovered the way he did. You have to see it to believe it."