Sarasota polio survivor swims a mile each day, roots for the Bucs and needs a new brace

Jan. 30—SARASOTA — Left leg strapped snugly into an aging brace, spine curved by an exhausted scourge from another era, diminutive Kathi Coleman is among the last of her kind. She is hard to miss as she hobbles slowly along with the aid of a cane.

In the water, however, she has no peers at all. At least, not at the three-lane, 25-yard long pool at the LA Fitness gym in Sarasota.

Mobility hardware discarded alongside her Tampa Bay Bucs towel draped over a chair, Coleman takes a seat on the tile and scoots toward the edge, where she plops into the water and shoves off, face down.

Left arm plunging forward, limp right arm trailing, right leg kicking, left leg still as a log, her form initially looks chaotic. But within seconds, the rhythm emerges: After three one-armed strokes, maybe four, Coleman rolls to her left, where the Bucs logo on her polyester trunks salutes her favorite team. Face up, she takes a gulp of fresh air. Then she's at it again: face down, three strokes, air, three strokes, air ...

Following three round-trip laps, she turns on her back for what she declines to call a backstroke. Because it's not. She paddles ahead with her left arm splashing by her side, neither leg breaking the surface, lower torso undulating, not unlike dolphin propulsion. "They told me at Florida State if I could swim like this, it would be like doing ab crunches," she says.

Coleman will spend an hour doing laps — she estimates she logs a mile or so every day, six days a week — before pulling another hour in a water aerobics class.

And this is life. Along with attending Bucs games. And Tampa Bay Rays games. And Tampa Bay Lightning games. With her best friend, Heather Grunwald.

At age 72, Coleman is among a dwindling generation of polio survivors caught up in an epidemic that peaked in the United States in 1952, with some 58,000 reported cases of the illness caused by the poliovirus. More than 3,000 died. Another 21,000-plus were left with varying degrees of paralysis.

Poliovirus was a formidable foe for reasons that may sound eerily familiar today — the majority of people who contract it are asymptomatic, and many more exhibit only flulike symptoms, but anyone infected can shed the virus for several weeks. Typically spread by the ingestion of food or water contaminated with fecal matter, or person to person, the poliovirus is linked to bad sanitation, but the contagion crossed all class lines. Its most famous casualty was President Franklin Roosevelt.

The vaccine developed by Jonas Salk in the 1950s went on to drive polio into virtual extinction; the virus was eradicated in the U.S. in 1979 and has nearly been snuffed out globally in the decades since.

That inoculation arrived too late for Coleman, infected when she was just 9 months old. But she considers herself lucky — the paralysis affected diagonally opposed limbs, not the more common same-side affliction. "Otherwise," she says, "I'd be swimming around in circles today."

She says she remembers the "purple, pink and green sheets" from her hospital isolation ward, and how "my mom couldn't hold me for a long time." She doesn't know how long she was in quarantine. She has a photo from her first birthday, celebrated in her hospital room.

Coleman also has a photo from Marquette School in her native Michigan, reflecting the pervasive scope of the disease. It's a group shot of her similarly affected classmates from the school's orthopedic department, several dozen strong, assembled in wheelchairs and leg braces.

The brace was a constant early childhood companion. She remembers how clunky it was, when she had to unlock its cumbersome latches as she took a knee for communion. After her family moved to Sarasota in 1960, she discarded the brace, this constant irritant, in spite of her atrophied left quadricep muscle.

She studied education at FSU and taught elementary school for 35 years. She has photos from that era as well, including seven years at Gocio, and 19 more at Lakeview, before retiring from teaching in 2006. In none of those images is she wearing a brace.

Coleman continued to work for seven years after leaving the classroom. From 1980-2013, she held a second job as a cashier at what used to be a Gulf gas station (now a 7-Eleven) on Clark Road, where she spent up to eight-hour shifts on her feet. Her husband had health issues; they needed the money. She finally gave it up eight years ago when new ownership cut her hourly pay rate and her right hip wore out.

Coleman was widowed in 2014, the same year she had hip replacement surgery. Today, she goes nowhere without her cane and her brace, and her collapsible wheelchair is always close.

In 2015, Heather Grunwald and her husband moved to Sarasota from Alaska. A physical education teacher for special-needs students, Grunwald was immediately struck by Coleman's swimming technique after she joined LA Fitness.

"I've always been an advocate for people with disabilities," says Grunwald, a water aerobics instructor who also coached swimming in college. "When I first noticed Kathi swimming all these laps, I couldn't believe how this woman in this little body could swim so well. And she works her tail off."

The two retired teachers bonded quickly. Grunwald remembered taking the polio vaccine — the oral version, the Sabin sugar cube — when she was a kid. One year younger than Coleman, Grunwald considers the arbitrary nature of who got the disease, and who got spared. Not to mention the grace with which her new friend keeps moving forward.

"What really impressed me about Kathi was her attitude. Some people with disabilities spend so much time complaining about, 'Oh, poor me, I can't do this or that,' but not Kathi. She doesn't ask for much. I mean, you can't look at her and be grumpy," Grunwald says. "She always puts a smile on your face. People see her swimming and think, 'Hey, if she can do that, then I can get up and work out.'"

Sporting a lion tattoo on her left shoulder — an homage to the old Orlando Lions soccer team — Coleman was voted "Most School Spirited" during her student days at Riverview High. Two years ago, she started pressing Grunwald to go with her to pro hockey, football and baseball games in Tampa/St. Petersburg.

After attending eight Bucs games in 2019, they decided to commit to season tickets for 2020 — "before they signed Brady and Gronk," Coleman stresses. "I'm sure the price went up after that." She and Grunwald reserved seats in section 122, in the end zone opposite the pirate ship.

Then the coronavirus struck. Even so, they managed to show up for home games against Green Bay, Minnesota and Atlanta. Coleman let Grunwald push her wheelchair to their seats. She has photos of herself with hardcore Tampa Bay fans, dressed in pirate regalia, mugging for the camera.

"That's because Kathi's just so damned cute — she's a magnet," says Grunwald. "People just want to love on her."

With the price of Super Bowl tickets averaging more than $14,000 apiece, Coleman is priced out of this once-in-a-lifetime event at Raymond James Stadium. She likes the idea of 7,500 free tickets going to health care workers and first responders. But she suspects many of the paying crowd are simply well-heeled dilettantes. "What you'll have in the stands are all these famous people who don't know a thing about football," she grumbles.

The closest she and Grunwald will get to the rematch with the Kansas City Chiefs will be the interactive NFL Super Bowl Experience at Tampa Riverwalk on Wednesday. Getting limited tickets to that event was a coup in itself.

There is this one thing, though: Coleman needs a new brace. The one she wears now is going on 5 years old, and fraying rapidly. The new one will be lighter and more durable. In years past, the insurance company would replace it every four years.

"But they changed the rules on me, and now it's every five years," says Coleman, who wears linebacker Devin White's No. 45 jersey. "It won't be five years until August. But I need one now."

Estimated cost: about $2,800. Coleman's solution: "If the players took up a collection and chipped in $100 apiece, I wouldn't have to wait for it."

If anyone's listening (she wrote a letter to the Bucs, informing them of her predicament), Coleman says she's easy to reach. "Put in your article that I live in the Ridgelake Apartments, an ADA facility."

Otherwise, she'll be in the water at LA Fitness. Beating polio. Again.

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