A clinical diagnosis of Quadriplegia or Paraplegia isn't just a matter of counting inert limbs. It's based on a cumulative score from multiple sensory and Motor-skills tests. Robby Beckman, for example, is a quadriplegic who can move his arms but has minimal hand control. Likewise, Rummerfield is still classified as a Quad because there are so many residual effects of his spinal cord injury. He chills easily, is Prone to kidney stones, can't grip tightly with his right hand and takes catnaps instead of restful sleeps. He's also numb below the knees and has brittle bones.

Beckman couldn't tell Rummerfield was a quadriplegic until Rummerfield told him. There are, however, subtle clues. Lacking feeling in his lower legs, he moves with the deliberateness of an older person. For all intents and purposes, he's walking on knee-high stilts. Block his field of vision, and he's helpless.

"If I try to carry a big box, I can't do it," Rummerfield says. "I fall down because I don't know where my feet are."

Running accentuates those deficiencies. He has a sluggish, unbalanced stride but can hold a steady, 12-minute-per-mile pace. Clearly, Rummerfield's brain and nervous system are compensating in some way. Exactly how, nobody knows. He says he looks and listens to his surroundings for cues. Every step he takes is a conscious decision. Nothing is instinctual. Acute spatial awareness might explain walking, possibly running. But driving race cars?

"So far from normal, it's unbelievable," says Belegu. "It's crazy that he can do that."

"MR. PAT DOESN'T KNOW IT YET, BUT I'M GOING TO BE HIS ASSISTANT WHEN I GRADUATE," teases Beckman, continuing his march on the Hydro Track. He lives with his parents in the Calvert County town of Owings, driving to Kennedy Krieger and to classes at the University of Maryland in a screaming-yellow, lift-equipped Chevy truck he nicknamed "Big Cheddar." Beckman wears his hair in a boyish buzz cut, and there is a mischievous Huck Finn quality about him that therapists love. As Rummerfield notes, Beckman is also "a bundle of energy, full of determination."

When Kennedy Krieger opened its spinal cord injury center 2 1/2 years ago, Beckman, now 24, was one of the first quadriplegics through the door. The center specializes in children but serves adults in search of intensive outpatient therapy. Back then, Beckman could barely roll over on an exercise mat. But here he is, finishing a five-minute workout in the Hydro Track.

"I'm like jelly right now," an exhausted Beckman sputters.

"You're looking good!" exclaims Rummerfield, patting him on the back.

In the hallway outside is another patient, Elliott Farmer, a Paraplegic only beginning his journey of recovery. He and Rummerfield talk almost daily. Farmer, who's 19, fractured his neck in a 2006 car crash and lost the use of his legs. He'd just finished his freshman year at the University of Missouri. A few days after the accident, his father read an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about Rummerfield preparing for a grueling endurance race: seven days of running 150 miles across China's Gobi Desert. That inspired Bud Farmer to bring his son to Kennedy Krieger. He and wife Sandy fly with Elliott to Baltimore every few months from their home in Jefferson City, Mo., for two weeks of Physical Therapy.

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, some 250,000 Americans have a debilitating spinal cord injury, and 12,000 new cases are added each year. A spinal injury essentially takes a hammer to the body's delicate circuitry. Messages sent through the Central Nervous System get garbled or misdelivered. The results can cause terrible discomfort. Farmer dreads taking showers. Every drop of water hitting him seems to have a jagged edge. The bolts of searing Neuropathic Pain he sometimes feels are worse, like being struck by lightning.

He recently was fitted with a fiberglass body brace. It extends from his ankles to his sternum, with hinges at the knees and hips. Farmer, in effect, is a crustacean, reliant on this external skeleton to keep him upright whenever he gets out of his wheelchair. He's learning to ambulate with crutches, navigating the corridor under the guidance of therapist Mike Lagonera.

They must pause periodically. Farmer's internal gyroscope is still out of whack. His ears sometimes feel as if they're filling with water, a dizzying sensation he refers to as "hearing the fan."

"It's because your blood pressure's down so low," Rummerfield tells him. "Whenever you first stand up, it shocks the system."

Rummerfield has been through this body-brace phase, adding that it took him eight months of Rehabilitation before he could stand without getting queasy. Normal increments of time don't apply to spinal cord therapy. Extraordinary patience is required. "You have to reeducate the body. The process can wear you down," says Rummerfield. "You've got to look at yourself like you're training for the Olympics."

Every day Farmer tells himself, "I know I'm gonna walk." He believes it because Rummerfield walks. For now, however, he would be content to have his crutches carry him as far as the soda machine down the hall, a distance of roughly 50 feet.

Farmer inches along, step by labored step. Lagonera follows close behind. He's wearing a blue Kennedy Krieger staff polo shirt. The back is emblazoned with a one-word motto printed in bright, white letters in about a dozen languages.

Esperanca . . . Esper . . . Espoir . . . Hoop . . .

Hope.

Rummerfield never made it through the Gobi. A freak rainstorm turned the desert floor into leg-sucking goo; the struggle was compounded by 60 mph sandstorms. After finishing the 27-mile opening stage, Rummerfield dropped out with what X-rays later revealed were fractured ankles. He'd thought they were just bad sprains.

Some of Rummerfield's stoicism and iron determination comes from his childhood. He is a native Californian. His birth name: Duke Stover, which sounds like the hero of a 1920s young-adult novel. It was an abusive household. Duke's arm was broken by his father when he was a toddler. All five Stover children wound up in an orphanage in Boise, Idaho. They were placed with separate families and lost touch.

Duke was adopted at age 7 and renamed Patrick by Tom Rummerfield, a childless, gimpy-legged, middle-age divorc¿ who lived outside the small mining town of Kellogg, about a half-hour from Coeur d'Alene in Idaho's northern panhandle.

Most Kellogg men worked, and sometimes died, in the nearby lead and silver mines. The town was full of rugged folk who knew hard times. Tom Rummerfield had his adopted son actually sign a contract stating they would care for each other till death. He was a proud, compassionate, resourceful, somewhat eccentric coot -- a onetime amateur boxer turned miner turned air-conditioning repairman who wrote poetry and hunted elk.

The elder Rummerfield loved baseball and believed his boy was destined to become a big league pitcher. Every day, he had Pat throw dozens of balls through a tire slung from a backyard tree and jump rope to build his legs. He regularly timed Pat in grade school as he ran a two-mile stretch of hills behind their house.

"My dad used to tell me," Rummerfield recalls, "that the will to win means nothing without the will to work."

Childhood buddy Mike Masters remembers Pat Rummerfield as "a scrapper." Wouldn't back down from anything. Loved challenges and thrived on competition. Six feet tall, Rummerfield could dunk a basketball and started at forward for his high school team. He was an adept trash talker on the court, so accomplished at it that an opposing coach once chased him into the stands for running his mouth one too many times during a game.

The Rummerfields belonged to the conservative Church of the Nazarene. Pat considered himself a devout but "rebellious Christian." Speed was his temptation. NASCAR drivers, not baseball players, became his idols. After graduation, Rummerfield followed his friends into the mines, but not with the intent of staying put. He planned to save some money, then go race cars in Europe.

That dream died on September 20, 1974, with a squeal of tires and a spray of splintered glass.

Rummerfield had been celebrating his 21st birthday the good ol' boy way: by binge-drinking with best friend Kevin Berg. Rummerfield says they downed two cases of beer and three bottles of apple wine. Berg then capped off their evening by losing control of Rummerfield's 1964 Corvette at 135 mph.

The driver stumbled away from the wreck with a chipped tooth. Rummerfield was flung from the passenger's seat into the rear storage compartment. He looked as if he'd been run through a wood chipper: scalp nearly shorn off, face and head in need of 150 stitches, right eyeball popped from its socket, one clavicle crushed, both knees hyperextended and, worst of all, four neck Vertebrae fractured.

He was transported to Spokane, Wash., for emergency surgery. Tom Rummerfield was given a bleak prognosis for his son: Don't expect him to last more than 72 hours. Pat, drifting in and out of consciousness, got drenched with the tears streaming off his father's face. "I told my dad, 'I don't feel like I'm gonna die.' He said, 'Well, they've got you pretty medicated.'"

Flat on his back, as stiff as cement, Pat requested that an X-ray of his neck be pinned above his bed where he could see it. He passed time praying, over and over: Dear God, give me a second chance to live and walk again . . .