Jogger can’t recall being hit by bike, but bruises make it real

Megan Williams never saw the bike that hit her on the lakefront path.

She was out for a 4-mile run after work — training for the Chicago Marathon — and about to make a U-turn to head back to her apartment in Old Town.

That’s when her memory goes dark.

She woke up in a hospital bed, hands restrained, a breathing tube down her throat, a fractured skull, bleeding on her brain — thinking she was having a nightmare.

“I didn’t know what was happening. I just couldn’t remember, and I still can’t. It sucks,” said Williams, 27.

Geraldine Tillman remembers. She ran past Williams about 6:30 p.m. on Sept. 23 near Diversey Harbor.

Then two guys on road bikes whirred past Tillman at a high speed.

“I heard one of them yell ‘watch out!’ ” Tillman said. “I turned around and saw them in mid-collision. She fell and hit her head, he fell on top of her with his bike and rolled off.”

Tillman’s running partner, Kelly Goncalves, heard one of the bikers call “On your left!”

For a few seconds, Williams began to convulse.

“A couple people were holding her head,” Tillman said. “She was coming to but very, very, very confused. No one wanted her to move … she knew her name but didn’t know where she lived or any of her friends’ names.”

Tillman called 911 and and used Williams’s phone to dial friends.

“The bicyclist was just scratched up, but he was much more concerned that she was OK,” Tillman said.

Williams, an accountant, is recovering at home, hoping nothing happened to her brain that could affect her ability to crunch numbers. Her only hiccup thus far: She called NFL quarterback Drew Brees “Drew Bees” while discussing fantasy football with her boyfriend.

The collision happened five days after a bicyclist struck a woman in New York City’s Central Park. The woman later died.

“I think in an ideal world, just because Chicago is a city of a ton of athletes, if they could divide the path into separate paths, one for bikes and one for every one else, that would help,” Williams said.

The notion of separate bike lanes is a realistic one for Ron Burke, who heads the Active Transportation Alliance, a nonprofit that promotes green transportation.

Burke said he has been trying to impart a sense of urgency upon the Chicago Park District for some time to install dedicated bike lanes, especially in the most congested and narrow “conflict zones” found between Grant Park and the area around Fullerton.

“Generally their response has been completely supportive of the objective,” Burke said. “It’s a matter of having the money to do it. We’re planning to organize folks to attend Park District board hearings in the fall and ask the board to prioritize this in their budget.”

Burke isn’t able to bolster his stance by pointing to statistics on lakefront crashes because there are no reliable numbers.

“The problem is, there’s no good data on this because these accidents don’t happen on roads, so they’re not documented very well. There’s been talk about going around to the local hospitals and collecting hospital records to get an idea, but to my knowledge no one has done this.”

A spokeswoman for the Chicago Park District anticipates the proposal to separate the path would be considered as part of the Lake Shore Drive reconstruction project, which is in conceptual planning stages. Construction is unlikely to begin until at least 2019. She also pointed out that pedestrians always have the right of way on the path.

More than 100,000 people use the path on a typical summer weekend, Burke said.

The bicyclist who hit Williams gave a statement to police. He was not issued a citation, a police spokesman said.

Williams isn’t sure who to blame, or if blame should even be assigned. She simply can’t recall what happened.

She says she was running on the gravel trail next to the paved path, with her earphones in, and that she always checks for traffic before crossing the path.

Tillman said the cyclist who hit Williams was trailing another cyclist. She suspects Williams may not have seen the second cyclist and stepped out into traffic after the first cyclist passed her, thinking the coast was clear.

In recent weeks, runners training for the marathon have flocked to the path. Williams, in addition to coping with dizzying headaches and a giant bruise on her head that makes sleeping difficult, is struggling to accept that her marathon dreams are done for the year.

On Friday, she visited the marathon expo at McCormick Place to get her bib, which she hopes the charity she was going to run with will be able to put to use.

“I got so emotional regarding the fact that I wouldn’t be able to run on Sunday, I ended up crying the seven blocks from the expo to the L train,” she said.

Williams is under strict doctors’ orders to stay home and avoid all forms of excitement for a few weeks. She insists she’ll try, but her time-killing plans already seem defiant.

In addition to cheering on fellow marathoners come race day, she intends to watch lots of the nonstop action TV show “24,” starring Kiefer Sutherland.