AFTER BEATING PARALYSIS, MAN SETS MARATHON RIDE.

Byline: Dana Bartholomew Staff Writer

Aaron Baker was a five-time amateur dirt-bike champion whose dreams of professional glory were shattered in a crash during practice that paralyzed him from his chest to his toes.

His doctor said he had a one-in-a-million shot at ever walking again. But five years later, the Northridge man has geared up to ride a 26-mile tandem bicycle ride with his mom before Sunday's Los Angeles Marathon.

``We're gonna be poppin' wheelies, poppin' wheelies on a tandem bike,'' said Baker, 24, a lanky young man with a stiff walk. ``I'm forever a racer. It's in my blood. I want to be the Lance Armstrong of spinal cord injuries.

``The sky's the limit.''

In May 1999, Baker, then 20, was living in Simi Valley and was an up-and-comer on a professional motocross team.

But while on an 80-foot practice jump for the Anaheim Supercross, Baker's 125 cc Suzuki stalled, then collapsed on its front wheel on the Moorpark track.

Baker heard three sharp cracks and lay gasping for air in the swirling dust. Seeing his limp hand in front of his face, he muttered, ``I can't move my hand. I know what happened: I broke my neck.''

The next three weeks were nip and tuck - the next two years a battle for the will to live. Doctors at Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks fused his spinal cord - its fourth, fifth and sixth vertebrae shattered in the fall.

During his treatment, Baker actually died, or ``flatlined,'' for one minute before being revived.

Laquita Conway, his mother, had flown out from her Oklahoma ranch to be with her son, but refused to accept the doctor's verdict.

``When the doctor told me Aaron had a one-in-a-million chance to walk, I shot out of my chair and yelled at the doctor, Don't ever tell my son that,'' said Conway, 46, who has retired from her art import business to tend to Aaron full time.

``I knew that if it took us the rest of our lives, that's what we would give it, and he would walk again.''

In the next four years, Aaron Baker went from being on suicide watch to the national inspirational lecture tour circuit, with his ``Optimism Management of Chronic Illness: the Aaron Baker Story, the Man Inside the Helmet.''

After the crash, the Simi Valley community rallied to defray Baker's $500,000 medical bills with a raffle, silent auction and a live disc-jockey appearance from KROQ-FM (106.7).

A year into physical therapy, insurance for the motocross dynamo ran out and Baker sat numb, despondent, unable to move, unable to eat more than a few bites, for weeks on a recliner in his mother's living room.

Then he met Taylor Isaacs, a British expatriate from South Africa, now a professor of kinesiology at the Center of Achievement at California State University, Northridge.

``When I first met him, he'd lost his sense of self - he looked at the word 'can't' and kept repeating it. There was nothing in the world that he could do,'' said Isaacs, a clinical exercise physiologist.

``But now, he's knocked the 't' off the word can't - he can do anything.''

After two years of exercise - from four to six hours a day - and a strict diet of up to 12 small meals a day, Baker not only can walk, but can ride a custom electric scooter, operate a personal watercraft, can drive a car and snorkle in ``Shark Alley'' off Hawaii.

``He went from a wheelchair to a walker, and eventually kicked the walker to the curb,'' Isaacs said of his patient's turnaround.

At 6 a.m. Sunday, mother and son will swing legs over their tandem bicycle, courtesy of KHS Inc. and Valley Bicycles of Chatsworth, to ride among the 15,000 bicyclists during the Acura Los Angeles Bike Tour on the 18th L.A. Marathon route.

``It's going to be really something very special for them, and for us as an organization,'' said Dr. William A. Burke, founder and president of the L.A. Marathon. ``Any time someone comes from a situation like that to ride 26 miles with his mother - it'll be an extraordinarily joyful day.''

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Photo:

(color) Aaron Baker and his mom, Laquita Conway, will ride a tandem bike in the Los Angeles Marathon on Sunday, five years after he was paralyzed from the chest down in a dirt-bike practice session.

Hans Gutknecht/Staff Photographer