There was a time, not too long ago, when Jill Mason was defined by how fast and how far her legs carried her.

In high school, she wowed Hooper Stadium crowds as a Nevada Union hurdler and cross-country star.

She was, according to former coach Sig Ostrom, "a consistent, well-disciplined, team-oriented athlete who let her actions do her speaking for her."

In college, her legs were pistons on the lacrosse fields at Santa Clara University. She dreamed of outrunning and outcycling the competition one day as a triathlete.

She often felt a "runner's high" that came with each race, each practice run or jog.

"Her legs meant everything to her," said her friend and former co-worker Danh Tran. "When we ran together, she could freaking turn it on," said Tran, who met Jill six years ago. Jill, Tran said, operated at something he called "agrospeed."

"She's crazy," Tran said. "Nothing can ever be quick enough for her."

But on a rain-soaked November day, Jill's legs are folded into a wheelchair, rendered inert by a tragic accident that paralyzed the former track star and took away her best friend and training partner on a bright and sunny Easter morning 19 months ago.

Her mahogany-brown eyes sparkle even as she struggles to push herself and a clunky wheelchair down the rain-slicked driveway at her parents' home. She smiles effortlessly at a visitor and cheers when she's crested the edge of the asphalt in one minute and 10 seconds.

It's a run that used to take one-tenth the time, before a drunken driver slammed into her bicycle on a country highway.

Yet Jill, who may never walk again as a result of the Easter Sunday 2004 accident that paralyzed her and killed her best friend, significant other and training partner, refuses to see anything but rays of sunshine in her life on this, a day with gray skies that spit rain from the clouds at will.

"You have two choices," the 1995 Nevada Union graduate said. "You can go, 'I hate what's happened to me' or say these are the cards you're dealt with. I don't have any other choice. I could wheel around and be (upset) all the time, but this is it."

Small miracles

These days, Jill takes pleasure in small miracles: Standing up, with assistance, in a contraption that includes a table where she can write journal entries; swimming in a warm-water pool; or enjoying dinner with friends at a restaurant.

"It's not how many breaths you take, but the number of times that take your breath away," Jill says, repeating a quote that has helped her during an arduous rehabilitative process.

Sometimes Jill forgets that the legs that once defined her no longer work. The brain injury she suffered as a result of the accident robbed her of much of her short-term memory, which is just now beginning to return.

But nothing has robbed Jill's indefatigable spirit or quick wit. She smiles easily and speaks hopefully of one day teaching young students the dangers of drinking and driving. There's too much good left to do, she says, both for herself and the man she loved.

Jill smiles when remembering Alan Liu, 31, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology she met in 2003 when she joined his Mountain View swim team.

"He had this stoicism about him where he could be silent, but influential," she says. "I know there will never be someone like him, and I'm just glad I had the chance to know him when I did."

Liu died instantly on Highway 12 after he and Jill Mason were struck by 69-year-old Harvey Hereford, a Santa Rosa attorney who struck the cyclists from behind in a Nissan Sentra.

Hereford said had no knowledge of the crash until he saw blood on his windshield, though he was found with a blood-alcohol level nearly four times the legal limit after he plowed into the couple, who were riding under clear, sunny skies.

"I just think that it's really sad that someone could do that," she said. "Because Alan was an amazing person, to take someone like that away, it's just unfathomable."

Alan, whom she met less than a year before the accident, was a silent but influential soul.

"People ask me would I have rather known Alan and be in a chair, or not know him and still be able to walk," Jill Mason says, her voice quivering. "I'd rather be in a chair."

Jill Mason still talks to Alan Liu's family, and she's been back to the scene of the accident. There, she's thought about their bicycle ride, about Alan, and about the man who ended one life and nearly took a second.

"It's a beautiful place," she said of the stretch of Highway 12 that snakes through small-scale vineyards. "I just think, why couldn't we have left 10 minutes later?"

Living for today

There's little sense now, Jill Mason says, in dwelling on the accident or the man who plowed into two cyclists the morning of April 11, 2004. There's anger, to be sure, but Jill Mason is largely turning that anger into motivation.

Soon, Jill Mason hopes to take a multimedia presentation to the schools to share with students the dangers of drinking and driving. "I want to tell people, 'look at what you can take away from someone or yourself.'" The PowerPoint presentation tells students in vivid detail just how the accident changed Jill Mason's life.

Asked if she was still angry at Harvey Hereford, who said he was drinking largely because he felt his family had neglected him on Easter, she says yes.

"Part of me thinks, it's not worth it to me to be angry. I don't want to give him the pleasure to know that I'm pissed."

Larry Mason said he's considered pursuing a civil suit against Hereford to help recoup more than $1 million in medical bills incurred by his daughter's hospitalization and aftercare, but he concedes the lawyer has no money and the Mason family probably won't see a penny.

"I'm still angry with him," Larry Mason said. "I feel sorry for him but I'm also feeling there's no excuse for what he did. The sentence he got was pathetic."

Hereford was sentenced in September 2004 to eight years in prison.

Jill Mason, whose family pleaded for a tougher sentence, refuses to lash out.

"That's not really me," she said.

Instead, she goes full-tilt into her recovery with the help of a full-time in-home physical therapist, as well as weekly physical and speech therapy at Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital and at the FREED Center for Independent Living. At home, she lifts weights to strengthen the right side of her body, which was weakened by her injury. She recently began submitting her own entries in a journal started by her younger brother, Dan, immediately after Jill entered the hospital.

Jill's father, Larry, an adaptive physical-education teacher, and mother, Joanne, a counselor at Union Hill School, brought Jill home to Cedar Ridge after five months in the hospital and a follow-up rehabilitation stay. The transition has been both welcome and nerve-wracking for Larry and Joanne.

"It's hard for me to see the Jill who was so active and so competent and confident, work to get those things back," said Joanne Mason.

The road to recovery has included an 11-hour surgery to fuse vertebrae back to Jill's spinal cord, five months of hospitalization and months of rehabilitation to help Jill Mason recover her speech, motor skills and memory.

From the beginning, Jill's outlook was grim.

For two months, Jill Mason didn't have the lung capacity to talk. Just days after the accident, doctors at Santa Rosa Medical Center told Larry and Joanne their oldest of two children could end up on life support for the rest of her life, the damage to her spinal cord was so severe.

"I don't think anyone could possibly understand what it's like to re-learn everything she's had to re-learn," Joanne Mason said. "She keeps making progress and is getting stronger."

Jill Mason's progress is accelerating. The "old Jill," her parents said, is returning.

She lifts weights and does push-ups each day with the help of physical therapist Christy Cox and swims weekly in a warm-water pool at Champion Mine School. Slowly, she's beginning to enjoy life as a 28-year-old.

Last month, Jill attended a Weezer and Foo Fighters concert in Oakland. "It just felt normal to go, because that's what someone my age would do," she said.

The week before Halloween, Jill Mason attended her 10-year high school reunion. She warned former classmates that she'd be rolling up in a chair.

"I knew that a lot of people were going to ask me about the accident," she said. "It wasn't my fault. I was just out doing something I loved."

This year, a group of Jill's friends from as far away as Hawaii and New Zealand will gather for a yearly pre-Thanksgiving Day meal in Sacramento.

The woman who earned a master's degree and held a promising job as a public-relations manager before her accident is eagerly anticipating the future.

"She deserves to be happy and doing the things she loves to do," Joanne Mason said.

Jill even takes time to poke fun at her arduous progress.

Jill and her father laugh about her right hand, which she had to re-learn to use because of injuries to her spine.

A few months after her accident, Jill Mason raised her right middle finger in triumph.

She does it now, as Larry Mason laughs heartily.

"I've loved it every time she does it," Larry said. "It doesn't bother me one bit."

Her standing frame, a vertical contraption that allows Jill to "stand up" and increase circulation in her legs, is a favorite machine.

"I love this thing," Jill said. "I love to get off my butt. I get so tired of sitting all the time."

Would you expect this former runner to say anything less?

"Jill has always been a fighter in mind, body and spirit," said Louise McFadden, one of her former teachers at Nevada Union. Her strength of conviction, McFadden said, is probably what's motivating her now.

The young woman who had such a zest for life has dreams of performing competitively as a wheelchair racer, of moving out of her parents' home next summer and starting a career as a motivational speaker.

While she may not be able to run the 110 hurdles or the Big Sur International Marathon like she did in 1999, those who know Jill best have no doubt she'll succeed.

"I think her outlook is very strong," said friend Heidi Scharrenburg, Jill's teammate on the Santa Clara lacrosse team and her marathon training partner. "I'm amazed at how she looks at the positive things in life. ...Her energy and her optimism is commendable."

Scharrenburg isn't surprised, either.

"That's just Jill. She's choosing to take that energy in a positive way, but I'm not surprised at anything Jill does. You wouldn't expect anything less from her."

In many ways, Jill Mason held the world in her hands before her Easter Sunday bicycle ride. Asked if it can be again, Jill Mason smiles at her father. "I'm working on that."

<I>Contact staff writer David Mirhadi by email at davidm@theunion.com or call 477-4229.</I>