Juan Carlos Viñolo was late. Work had run longer than expected, and then traffic on Interstate 8 was bad. He texted his cycling buddies that he wouldn’t make it in time for their ride up the Silver Strand.

He went to Fiesta Island instead.

It was Aug. 12 last year, a Tuesday. Fiesta Island on Tuesdays is cycling’s version of a pickup basketball game. Those who can make it roll out in a pack at 5:30 p.m., usually 20 to 40 riders, and do lap after lap on the oval road.

They work on their proximity riding, training for road races in which they are inches apart in a peloton, drafting off each other. They ride two abreast and rotate who’s out front, where there’s no protection from the wind and the pedaling is harder.

People like to ride on Fiesta Island because it’s considered one of the safest places in San Diego for road cycling. It’s secluded, the street is one-way only, and on weekdays, especially in the evening, there isn’t much car traffic.

On that Tuesday in August, Viñolo rode his black Ridley, a Belgian-made bike, toward the front of the pack. The La Jolla sales manager has loved cycling since he was a kid growing up in Mexico City, loved the freedom, the wind on his face. Even as he got married, even as he had two kids, even as he passed age 40, he found time to ride.

The pack leaned into a blind curve shouldered by tall bushes. Viñolo couldn’t see very far in front of him, couldn’t see the car coming the wrong way on the road.

Couldn’t see it until an instant before it plowed into him and nine other riders. “Carnage everywhere,” one of them later recalled.

Bicyclists go to the aid of fellow cyclists who were hit and propelled onto a car on Fiesta Island. Photo courtesy Joel Price

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Viñolo’s left shoulder smashed into the car where the windshield meets the roof. His legs whipped over his head and onto the roof. How odd, he thought, to see his knees resting next to his left ear.

Other riders rushed to help. “I can’t feel my legs,” he said.

They told him he was in shock, that he was going to be OK, and they held him in place until the ambulance came so he wouldn’t slide off the roof. But looking back he thinks he probably understood the truth right then.

Life as he knew it was over.

Life as it is was just beginning.

What ifs

He was in the intensive care unit at UC San Diego for 33 days. He had a dislocated left clavicle, eight broken ribs, deep cuts on his left hand. He lost one kidney, was on dialysis for almost three weeks while the other kidney recovered, had damage to his liver, his lungs, his spleen, “every organ except my heart and my brain,” he said.

And his spine was severed at the T-4 vertebra, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down.

At first, doctors wouldn’t tell him whether he would walk again. They have to wait for the swelling to go down, they said. Every patient is different, they said. Viñolo’s wife, Emma Irarragorri, remembers doctors saying there was a 2 percent chance he would be OK, “and I was so hoping for that 2 percent.”

View the photo gallery: Cyclist adjusts to paralysis

They sent their two children, Daniela, now 7, and Eduardo, 5, to live temporarily with relatives in Torreon, Mexico, while Viñolo went to Sharp Memorial Rehabilitation Center in Kearny Mesa. He was there for 70 days, recuperating and learning how to move around in a wheelchair.

The adjustment was overwhelming. “It’s not easy to be one way for 43 years and then all of a sudden be another way,” he said. “On one hand, you’re happy to be alive. On the other hand, you think maybe you should have died, that it would be better for everybody that way.”

Every morning he woke up realizing it wasn’t just a bad dream. He couldn’t help but play the “what if” game.

What if he hadn’t been late getting out of work that day?

What if he hadn’t been near the front of the peloton?

What if the car had arrived 30 seconds later, when they would have been out of the blind curve?

He found himself asking another question, too, especially since none of the other riders was seriously injured: Why me?

But his wife wouldn’t let him wallow long in self pity. “You can ask ‘why me’ all you want but you’re not ever going to have an answer,” she said. “If you spend your entire life worrying about why it happened to you, you’re not going to get through it.”

They met on a blind date arranged by friends in Mexico. He’s six years older and was already out of college (Hofstra University in New York, business degree). She was working on becoming a psychologist and not all that interested in seeing him.

Friends kept pushing them together, though, and in November 2004 they married. They moved to San Diego four years ago on a worker visa Viñolo has to run sales in North, Central and South America for Natra, a Spanish multinational company that manufactures chocolate products.

At Sharp Rehab, Irarragorri pushed her husband hard to get ready for his new life — for their new life.

He struggled. “I pretty much hated her that whole time,” he said.

New friends

Not long after the accident, Irarragorri got an email from Carolyn Odom, a woman she’d never met.

Odom’s brother was paralyzed in a rock-climbing fall in Ohio in 2003, an accident that changed her life, too. She was in college in Scotland, planning for a career in library science, and instead found herself immersed in the world of physical rehabilitation and wheelchair sports.

That led to a job with the national wheelchair rugby program, where she met her future husband, Jeff Odom, one of the players. He was paralyzed in a traffic crash 14 years ago. They moved to San Diego, long a hotbed for wheelchair rugby, and she’s now director of programs for the Challenged Athletes Foundation, a nonprofit that helps disabled people return to active lifestyles through grants for equipment, training and travel to competitions.

So when she reached out to Irarragorri, hers was the voice of experience.

“You never know how people are going to react,” Odom said. “Some people say ‘Thanks but no thanks.’ They insist they are going to get out of rehab and walk again. Other people can’t wait to get together. Everybody has their own timetable.”

Irarragorri didn’t see much reason to hesitate. “I just figured the sooner the better,” she said. “I had so many questions.”

They met for breakfast, the beginning of what is now a friendship. Odom took it as a good sign that one of the first things Irarragorri asked about was sex.

“It told me they had a healthy relationship and they were looking forward,” she said. “They were focused on what is possible and not what was lost.”

Jeff Odom went with his wife to the rehab center one day to visit Viñolo. Odom remembered his own time in rehab, when he met Andy Cohn, a legendary wheelchair rugby player who was in the documentary “Murderball.”

At the time, Odom said, he was afraid of his future. “Then this guy in a wheelchair shows up who is talking about going out to clubs, meeting girls, driving around. Just blow and go, throw stuff in the car, make things happen. Just live your life.”

But he also knows everybody is different. Viñolo was mostly worried about whether he’d be able to go back to work and provide for his family. “How am I going to send my kids to college,” he wondered, “when we’re spending all our money on me?”

But Odom could also see the way Viñolo lit up every time he talked about cycling.

An invitation

Pat Murray was in the peloton that evening last August but had run out of steam and fallen behind the group when the car plowed into the riders. She rolled up seconds later and was stunned by all the scattered bikes and bodies.

One of her friends had gone into the windshield. Viñolo, a rider Murray knew by sight but not by name, was on the roof.

“It could have been me,” she said.

A week after the crash, Murray and hundreds of other people, including San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman, rode around Fiesta Island in support of the Viñolo family. Many of them donated to a charity drive organized by Martha Sheridan, a family friend, that has raised more than $215,000 through gofundme.com (Help-Juan-Carlos-Violo).

Murray said she felt a bond with Viñolo and wanted to stay in touch. She visited him in the ICU and in the rehab center, met his family and friends. She was there when the Viñolo children saw their dad for the first time in a wheelchair.

Other cyclists kept stopping by, too. One brought him magazines and brochures from a cycling convention. Another got Viñolo a souvenir football helmet from his favorite team, the Dallas Cowboys, signed by the quarterback, Tony Romo.

Cyclists also have been showing up at the court hearings for the car driver. Theresa Lynn Owens, 50, is awaiting trial on felony charges of driving under the influence of methamphetamine and causing serious bodily injury. She faces up to 18 years in prison.

Last November, Murray and others with the San Diego Bicycle Club decided to route one of their weekly Sunday rides past the rehab center. There were about 25 of them. Viñolo came outside in his wheelchair to greet them.

He was given a cycling jersey from the 2014 Salsa Ride, held to benefit children on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border every year, and was invited to be the lead rider at the 2015 event.

It seemed like a dream, getting back on a cycle in seven months. He would need one he could pedal by hand, and those aren’t cheap — several thousand dollars.

The ride was June 14. Viñolo was there, on his new handcycle, paid for by the Challenged Athletes Foundation. His friends paid for a motorized lift that helped him move back and forth between his wheelchair and the cycle.

“To get out there so soon after he was injured — it blows my mind,” Murray said. “As a cyclist, it’s inspiring to watch.”

Adjustments

Viñolo hates to sound ungrateful.

There’s joy in riding again, he said. The movement. The wind on his face. But it’s not the same.

“I can’t help it,” he said. “I keep thinking about what I used to do.”

In the garage of his family’s rented home, the handcycle sits next to one of his road bikes. Every year for a decade, he rode with a group from Mexico City to Acapulco, 240 miles spread over several days. He also went every year with friends from Houston to Austin, 160 miles.

On Fiesta Island, in addition to the Tuesday night training pelotons, he would sometimes go out on Thursdays, when some of San Diego’s best and fastest cyclists ride. “Just being able to hang with them, I felt proud about that,” he said.

Jeff Odom said Viñolo’s disappointment is not unusual. Odom plays golf — next month he’s headed to Scotland for an event — and he still catches himself, 14 years after his injury, wondering how much better a shot would have been if he was able-bodied.

Odom also pointed out that Viñolo is older than a lot of the newly injured, who tend to be under 30 (the prime age-range for the kind of risk-taking that can put someone in a wheelchair). It’s harder to adjust when you’re older.

As Viñolo puts it, “I had my life and I was happy with it.”

But when his dark moods pass, he said he also recognizes that his recovery is a marathon, not a sprint, and he feels fortunate about a lot of things. He’s back to work full time. His home is single-story, which means no stairs. He’s made a lot of new friends.

He misses the little things, he said, like being able to reach down and pick up his kids. But they aren’t shy about climbing into his lap. Or trying to figure out how to help him. When his daughter heard about a robotic exoskeleton that could help paralyzed people walk, she started saving her spare change.

Viñolo’s immediate goal is to lose weight. He was already burly, thanks to 15 years of weightlifting, and he’s gained 30 pounds since the crash, most of it in his midsection. The Challenged Athletes Foundation is arranging for him to work with a personal trainer.

He imagines a time when it will be easier for him to transfer from his wheelchair to the handcycle, and maybe get out on the road more often. The longest he’s been able to ride so far is a few miles, a fraction of the 30-mile trips he routinely took.

If he starts road cycling again, he said, he knows where he’ll have to go some day. Back to one of his regular riding spots, back to the place where he was doing something he loved when his life was changed forever.

“I’ll have to do it,” he said. “I’ll have to ride again on Fiesta Island.”