Guillain-Barré patient runs NYC marathon a decade after diagnosis

Michael Ring was organizing a 100-mile bike tour in Putnam County in 2014 when he started falling, dropping things and tripping over things — it was happening so often that his then-boss noticed.

“He took me aside and said, ‘I’m not talking about this, but I’m a cancer survivor. I say it to scare you. Call your doctor. That’s weird,” Ring, now 61, recalled to The Post.

The Brooklyn resident saw a doctor and the news wasn’t good — he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome. His immune system was attacking his nerves, temporarily paralyzing him.

Ring spent 135 days in the hospital and had to relearn how to walk. Now, he’s preparing to run Sunday’s TCS New York City Marathon, a 26.2-mile course he’s known all too well since its inception in 1980.

It takes him twice as long these days—he sports ankle braces and runs with two volunteers from Achilles International, a nonprofit that supports athletes with disabilities.

“I’ll start 40 minutes ahead of the elite men and they’ll all pass me, all 55,000 people,” Ring said. “My Achilles guides are like my defenders in attack. They will run behind me for the first half of the race so people don’t run into me in the second half of the race.”

The Park Slope father of two was a senior at Sheepshead Bay High the first time he attempted the NYC marathon. A self-described “spaz,” he joined the track team to be able to pass gym class.

He ran the marathon with no training or exercise—and it didn’t go well.

“I went out too fast and then I drank too much water in Queens and jumped off the Queensboro Bridge,” Ring said, admitting he quit at mile 16.

He gave up running but eventually returned to the sport in the early 90s. He ran the NYC Marathon from 1993 to 2013—setting a personal course record of 4 hours, 11 minutes in 1994—and was registered for 2014 when disaster struck.

Ring took a road trip in April 2014 to watch the Boston Marathon — that race was especially special because it was the first since the 2013 bombings.

Afterward, he and friends ate dinner at a “hole-in-the-wall” barbecue joint. He had chicken. He doesn’t remember the name of the place and isn’t exactly sure where he got sick.

But he had a bad three-day bout of food poisoning that changed his life forever. Food poisoning from Campylobacter, a type of bacteria that can cause diarrhea, is one of the most common causes of Guillain-Barré.

some Between 3,000 and 6,000 Americans develop the disease each year, usually after experiencing a respiratory or gastrointestinal infection.

“If you take all people with Guillain-Barré, it’s usually said that about 20% of people have a poor outcome, which we often define as not being able to walk without help in the next six months. [mark]Thomas H. Brannagan III, director of the Peripheral Neuropathy Center and co-director of the EMG lab at Columbia University Medical Center, told The Post.

Ring, unfortunately, has acute motor axonal neuropathy, a very rare variant of Guillain-Barré that usually means a more rapid onset of severe muscle weakness.

He underwent intravenous immunoglobulin, received antibodies from healthy donors and off-label chemotherapy before facing a long course of physical therapy.

“The doctors would ask me to wiggle my toes, and I’d look at the doctor, I said, ‘Why don’t you ask me to wiggle my toes?’ I just couldn’t. I’d look at my feet and they wouldn’t move,” she said. Ring.

Eventually, he was “wriggling around” – now he wears carbon fiber ankle braces because he has trouble lifting the front of his legs. They also prevent him from turning his ankles.

He usually sees a physical therapist every two weeks, although he admits his recovery has “leveled off.”

He’s had about 10 surgeries in the past decade — his toes were reshaped to make it easier to hold things like cups and pens, and some bones were removed from his right foot so he wouldn’t hit the ball in orthotics .

Bind trains by running carefully two or three days a week, as just one fall can derail his progress. He’s found a lot of success using the elliptical machine, where he can take off his orthotics and work up a sweat because his feet don’t leave the plates.

The disability rights advocate, who sits on NYC’s Transit Accessibility Advisory Committee, returned to the marathon in 2017 and has completed several races since then. He finished last year’s NYC Marathon in 8 hours, 36 minutes and 15 seconds, a pace of 19 minutes, 42 seconds per mile.

Sometimes he doesn’t always finish, and that’s okay. He pulled out of last December’s PPTC Endurance Fest 50-kilometer race around mile 13 of 31 because he was wet from the rain. He told himself that he would recover and finish another race.

“When I was in the hospital, I was missing races, I was missing things I signed up for, a shrink came to talk to me, asked me what was important,” Ring said.

“My twins were 14 at the time. I want to be a model. And she says, ‘Well, we have to find another way for you to be a model,'” he continued. “Now, I just understand, I have to show them that you can fall into a big hole and you have to try to get out.”