Megan Cunningham’s eyes were open, but she could only see black.  Just moments before, she was sitting in the backseat of her parents’ truck as they began the trek to Wyoming for an annual camping trip. It was July 2015.

The Cunninghams zipped down Interstate 70 in the dead of night, pulling a new camper behind the vehicle as it rocked side to side in the wind.

Megan remembers her father yelling to slow down, then feeling the truck screech to a halt as her mom slammed on the brakes. When Megan looked out the window, she saw the camper swing around as the truck flipped perpendicular to the highway. The camper crashed into the side of the truck; they rolled over five times. Megan looked around for something, anything. She was lost in a sea of black, and that’s the last thing she remembers.

The Mizzou cross-country runner woke up in a hospital emergency room to the news that her skull was fractured in more than 20 places. Her neck was broken in four places, and she had bleeding in her brain.

“I was really confused,” she says. “I remember them saying I needed stitches and getting scared because I’m terrified of needles, but they’d already done the stitches and I hadn’t felt a thing. And they needed to cut my clothes off, and I worried about what I was wearing.”

Her mother had cuts and bruises, but her dad suffered injuries similar to her own. While Megan would have surgery on her neck and begin a long road to recovery, her dad was a quadriplegic.

The magnitude of her recovery, and her father’s situation, were incomprehensible. After Cunningham underwent neck surgery, her doctor recommended she take a semester off from school, but doing so meant she would lose the scholarships that allowed her to attend Mizzou. She enrolled mostly in online classes so she could work at her own pace but attended science courses, her most difficult subject.

Cunningham wasn’t permitted to exercise for five months, but she promised herself she’d go to cross country practices every day. She could hardly walk from her car to the track without feeling a splitting pain. “I didn’t think I’d ever run at the collegiate level again,” she says. “I thought I’d get back into running so I could go for a hobby jog. There wasn’t a lot to do when the girls would go run, so I would slowly walk around, and I eventually found myself able to walk four or five miles to watch them run.”

Her head throbbed from migraines, and her neck was sore, but Cunningham continued walking. Just as cross country had been, walking became her outlet. In January 2016, she was cleared to jog again.

“I thought it would come back naturally, but I felt as stable as a newborn deer,” Cunningham says. “I had to work with Coach [Marc] Burns and learn to trust my own judgment about what was good for me and my body. As a cross-country coach, this isn’t an injury you’re really exposed to. You know guidelines from coming back from a fracture, but not a skull and neck injury. We kept everything open.”

Despite suffering from migraines and dizziness, Cunningham continued to train. It was her goal to get back running with her “girls.” During the 2015-16 winter season, she asked her coach if she could compete in Mizzou’s home indoor track meet to show her family how far she’d come. It had only been seven months since the accident, and Cunningham could barely run. But she finished — 3,000 meters to be exact, and in 10 minutes, 34.85 seconds. She didn’t stop smiling for days.

“I was so glad to be running again,” she says. “That’s all that mattered.”

Cunningham raced again in January 2017, and by the end of her outdoor season, she was recording some of her fastest times ever, including a personal best in the 5,000 meters. She’s only improved, pushing herself more than she ever had.

At the beginning of the 2017-18 season, her redshirt senior year, Cunningham set some lofty goals for herself. In cross country, it was to be all-region, which she accomplished with a 12th-place finish. But in February, she dominated, taking first place at the SEC Indoor Track & Field Championships in the women’s 5,000-meter run.

This spring, in outdoor, her goal is to make the national championship.

With every step she takes, Cunningham isn’t only running for herself — she’s running for her dad. He can’t travel to her meets, so her teammates make sure to FaceTime him during her races so he doesn’t have to miss them. “It’s as much for me as it is for my dad,” she says. “I wanted to take things one day at a time, do better than I’d done before. I wanted to help my team. On top of that, I view the fact that I’m still running as a huge comeback.”

Photos by Jeff Curry (courtesy of Mizzou Athletics) and Emil Lippe