Max Krohn was never a big runner.
But all of that changed four years ago after an accident left him paralyzed and fighting to regain any mobility from the neck down.
Krohn was about to start his junior year in college. He was on track to graduate with a finance degree, but he said something about that didn’t feel right. He decided to take a break from school and move out to Breckenridge, Colorado.
“I had this idea in mind for years. I always wanted to be a ski bum,” he said.“Not a whole lot of people were in favor of that decision. And I guess in some way they ended up right.”
Krohn had an easy routine: wake up, go to work at a local Mexican restaurant, clock out and hit the slopes. He spent a lot of his free time skiing and snowboarding.
Then, on Feb. 14, 2022, almost exactly four years ago to the date of the Austin Marathon, Krohn said he had an "off day."
It was sunny and unseasonably warm. Krohn was snowboarding with some friends down a blue diamond when they hit a fork on the slope.
“They went right, I went left, and we just kind of lost each other,” he said. “I saw them disappear behind a big wall of trees.”
Krohn was racing 40 miles an hour down the mountain, alone. Then he tried doing a nollie — a trick where you pop off the nose of the board and catch some air. It didn’t work.
“[The snow] grabbed the front of my board as I was propelling off the nose,” he said. “I just went flying. I felt like I was in the air forever.”
Krohn said he flew about 100 feet and landed on his neck.
“The first thing that went through my head was, ‘Did I just die?’” he said. “Because from that point, there was no sensation, no function, no nothing.”
Krohn doesn’t know how much time passed while he was lying in the snow.
He said he tried calling for help, but no words came out.
Eventually, he was brought to an intensive care unit, and doctors confirmed he was paralyzed from the neck down. After eight days, Krohn said he started to regain some feeling below his shoulders, but his doctors were careful not to promise he would be the same again.
"I have a lot to think about almost always," he said. "And I always find my best ideas when I'm when I have no distractions."
Videos of Krohn from days after the accident show his physical therapist asking him to make a fist and spread his fingers out, and he can’t.
But Krohn said he stayed positive. He developed a mantra while he was recovering: goal or highest potential.
The thing is … if you can’t control anything, then you have no business being stressed about it,” he said. “But for me, it was always ‘What can I control?’ … ‘What can I do every single day to grow and try to get the best possible odds at a good recovery?’”
Months of physical therapy followed.
First, he practiced sitting in a wheelchair and propelling himself forward with his legs.
Then, he practiced standing.
Next came standing with his eyes closed without falling over.
Once he could do that, he was ready to learn how to walk again. He would put on a bulky harness attached to a track on the ceiling and practice putting one foot in front of the other.
He said it was like being right-handed and having to write with your left hand “for the rest of your life … until you perfect writing with your left hand.”
Three months later, Krohn was walking again. He said he was mostly just taking supervised trips from the couch to the fridge. But he kept improving, and he said he didn’t want to take his mobility for granted again.
He got an idea.
“I was like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna do a triathlon,’” he said.
He signed up for a sprint triathlon — roughly a half-mile of swimming, 12 miles of biking and a little over three miles of running — and completed it a year and a half after his injury in Breckenridge.
After that, he said he got the “runner’s bug.”
Despite his families’ hesitations, he signed up for a marathon in Madison, Wisconsin. He had never run more than 4 miles before — a marathon is 26.2 miles.
“Everybody was kind of [convincing] me, ‘You’ve never even ran a half marathon before. You’ve never done this, you’ve never done that,” he said. “And I was like well, the point isn’t to do something that I know I can do.”
His goal was to finish.
That was his conservative goal, anyway.
“I had in the back of my mind that I wanted to break four hours,” he said. “I ended up with four hours and nine seconds.”
Now Krohn is determined to break four hours in the Austin marathon on Sunday. He will be one of 30,000 people taking on the notoriously hilly course.
He trains almost every day after work — but not like most marathon runners.
A typical marathon training schedule consists of four to five runs a week, including at least one long run. Many training plans advise runners to work their way up to at least one 18 mile run before race day.
Krohn has a different approach.
He mostly does strength training. The farthest he will have run before Sunday is 13 miles — on the treadmill and without music.
But he has a good reason for this: Krohn’s C3 and C4 vertebrae — the third and fourth cervical bones in the neck — are now fused. If he were to fall on a run outside, he said he could risk being paralyzed permanently.
But running with friends could make this less risky. Krohn moved to Austin in November and hasn't yet found a group to train with. He said that is his true goal for this marathon.
“Ideally [I’ll] meet some people who are interested in the same things,” he said. “I think that’s what I’m really trying to get out of it.”
