ATHENS — It had been less than a handful of years since the bicycle accident that left her temporarily paralyzed and nearly dead.

Her body would heal in time, much faster, in fact, than the emotional scars left from a headfirst fall over a 20-foot bridge out in the middle of nowhere.

When Athens resident Penny Jones jumped from the pool at the Cain Center’s 25th Annual Athens Triathlon last Saturday, she headed into unchartered waters. Since her accident in the fall of 2006 in Nacogdoches, Jones hadn’t been back on a bike — other than down to the end of her driveway and back several times.

“I was always too scared to go back out all by myself,” she admits.

That makes her story all the more inspirational.

Jones finished the triathlon — fourth in her Athena class, mind you — in 1:49:17. Though it wasn’t a first-place finish, or even a top-three, it was as big a victory as she has had in her active life. And she was mighty proud of it.

It was a victory for her family, who supported her recovery efforts that were expedited only through hard work, a stubborn determination and God’s grace.

Her husband Jeff — an Agriculture Science teacher at Athens High School — stood by her side through the long hours of rehabilitation after the fall left her with a broken back, a spinal cord injury that caused permanent nerve damage from the knee down, a collapsed lung, broken ribs and a broken shoulder blade.

Jeff was among the first people Penny remembers seeing as she was lifted up the steep creek embankment in Nacogdoches. Dazed and confused from the pain suffered in the fall, she asked him what he was doing there.

“Where else would I be?” he offered back.

She had been out that October day practicing for her first triathlon, taking a Sunday morning off from church to sneak in a ride. A few weeks prior, she completed a duathlon — which includes two of the three triathlon events — and was ready to take the next step.

Swimming and biking and running, after all, had always come natural for Penny.

“Since I was 12 I wanted to do a triathlon,” she says. “I just thought the triathlon was the coolest thing. I did all that anyway as a kid.”

Growing up, she received a world of support from her parents, Buck and Linda Prewitt and her mom, Gail, in pursuing her outdoor endeavors. Gail would buy her triathlon magazines and all the gear she needed to get going.

When Gail was dying of cancer years later, Penny promised her she would complete a triathlon in her honor.

She completed the Dogwood Duathlon in September 2006, and immediately turned her eyes toward her triathlon training.

It was a road much longer than she could have imagined, beginning with the spill over the bridge the next month.

The accident happened shortly after 10:51 a.m., the last time she stopped for a drink and looked at her watch. She remembers trekking out onto the wooden bridge, without guardrails. She remembers seeing her front tire get wedged between two warped pieces of wood on the bridge.

Then she blacked out. She came to momentarily, feeling her body smack against the side of the bridge as she tumbled over and fell into a painful silence.

All she can tell you next is that she placed a 9-1-1 call at 11:23 a.m. That in itself was a miracle, she said, because her cell phone had been tucked in the back waist of her pants in a small pouch and far out of the reach of a woman with a body full of shattered bones. When she came to, the phone was in her hands.

It took emergency responders a little time to find her because she had fallen in a rural area and couldn’t quite describe where she was. She continually told the dispatcher “wooden bridge.” But Nacogdoches has more than one wooden bridge, so police asked her to keep her phone on while they sent units to the bridges they knew about. They were able to locate her by listening to the background noise on her phone and listening for their own sirens.

Penny was in a medically induced coma for a couple of days, until surgery. When she awakened from the coma, she remembers the song, “Your Grace Is Enough,” playing through her head.

At that point, she still wasn’t sure if she’d ever walk normally again.

“No matter what happened, no matter if I was going to be in a wheelchair, I knew God has a plan for me, and this is OK,” she says. “I was at peace with it. ... I’m alive because of a miracle, and I’m walking because of prayer. Everyone we knew, and some we didn’t, covered us in prayer.”

She remained in the hospital three more weeks. Then came two more frustrating and physically challenging weeks of therapy in Tyler.

She hadn’t yet been home since the morning she left on her bike ride. Her homecoming, literally, was Nov. 9 — a month and a day after the accident and months ahead of her doctors’ expectations.

She got to take the turtle-shell like brace off her back in January 2007, and a year later, the doctor took out the surgically inserted screws and rods.

Half a year later, Jeff landed a job with Athens ISD. He began in July 2008, and the Jones family soon joined First Baptist Church of Malakoff.

At FBC Malakoff, she joined an exercise group. Then last March, she volunteered at the 24th Athens Triathlon.

“That really put a fire under me,” she says. “I saw the triathlon and I thought, ‘Well maybe I can run a 5K.’”

She made her “official day back” the Speak Up for the Kids CASA 5K in Palestine last April. She followed that up with a handful more and soon after set her focus on competing in this year’s Athens Triathlon.

Through her dedication, she constantly questioned whether she was taking too much time away from her family training for the event. She prayed often, offering to give her healthy obsession up to God if it wasn’t what He wanted her to do.

“And He just kept giving me the green light and the courage to do it,” she says.

Courage and faith, fueled her as she tried to take her mind off her pain, off her struggle, off her anxiousness on the bike and on her way to the finish line as she raced last Saturday.

Her thoughts turned to her mom as she finished, keeping the promise she had made years ago.

“It was closure.”

Jayson Larson is sports editor of the Athens Review.