by Scott Jenkins (courtesy Salisbury Post)

Sometimes, Rick Karampatsos' body wants to give up.
The vertebrae in his back scrape together. Arthritis twists his hands and wracks his knee.
He endures another of the blinding headaches that have attacked him for decades.
When those things happen, when the pain swells within and his body wants to quit, his spirit won't let it.
Instead, he runs.
He runs marathons.
He runs on faith.
Karampatsos slogs like a tugboat through blue water at the J.F. Hurley Family YMCA.
A flotation belt keeps him upright. Devices strapped around his ankles help him float, too, and create a drag, making progress harder.
His legs churn in slow motion, his hands slice the liquid barrier, carrying him from one end of a marked lane to the other and back.
"This is boring," he says, never resting, "but it works."
Pool training is a low-impact way to keep in shape, he says. He also uses the treadmill and does some light weightlifting at the club but still logs about 200 miles a month outside the gym.
It's just a few days after Karampatsos completed the New York City Marathon and about 10 days before his next race, which takes place today in Tulsa, Okla. It will be his sixth marathon in eight weeks, his 27th overall.
Karampatsos wants to run marathons in all 50 states and Washington. It's an amazing feat but not unheard of. There's even a club for it.
What is astounding is that he's running at all after a string of near-catastrophic accidents during his lifetime and the physical ailments that now disable him.
But Karampatsos, a lean 60-year-old, doesn't think it's amazing. He finds it heavenly.
"I believe," he says, "it is God's will for me to run."
It was not always so.
Karampatsos says he grew up "religious" but not the born-again Christian he is now.
He ran competitively in high school but saw that career crash to a halt when he wrecked his motor scooter just two days after graduating in 1964. The impact fractured his skull. For the better part of two weeks, he lay unconscious.
"It was a real bad deal," he says.
Bad enough to snap his femur. Doctors inserted a 14-inch metal rod in Karampatsos' leg, but his body rejected it. After the rod was removed, his leg healed on its own. He still has the rod.
The accident caused Karampatsos to lose his sense of smell, a disability that kept him from being drafted and, he says, may have saved his life by keeping him out of Vietnam. Feeling guilty, he tried to sign up, but the military wouldn't take him.
He didn't escape lasting, pain, however — those excruciating headaches.
And it wasn't his last brush with serious injury. He's had other accidents driving, skiing, working. It seems, he says, like "I've been forever in the hospital."
But two of those accidents stand out because either one "could very well have taken my life," he says.
It is only by the grace of God, he believes, that one them did not.
In 1981, Karampatsos worked for a printing company in his home state of Massachusetts. He flipped the switch on a piece of machinery one day and it malfunctioned. Electricity tore through his body.
"I could see the colors going up my arm for a fraction of a second," he recalls.
The jolt lifted him off his feet and slammed him against a wall. He lay on his back for nearly two years
with what felt like a perpetual sunburn. A lump formed in his neck.
This time, Karampatsos called on a higher power. He'd given his life to God in 1974 and had people praying "every kind of prayer you could." But he wasn't getting any better.
He couldn't work. He couldn't walk without a cane.
About two years after the accident, Karampatsos and his family attended a Christian camp. He was going to get an extension cord from a van when he fell to the ground.

"I fell a lot" in those days, he says.
But this time was different. This time, he heard a firm, loving voice say, "Get up."
So he did. Without his cane.
He grabbed his neck. The lump was gone.
"I just knew that God had touched me," he says.
Karampatsos went running toward the camp chapel to tell others. He tripped, cutting and scraping himself.
"I ran in all excited saying 'I'm healed! I'm healed!' and I'm all bloody and dirty," he laughs. "But they realized quickly that 'Rick can't walk like that.' "
The following April, after a heavy Massachusetts snowstorm damaged his brick chimney, Karampatsos was on his roof clearing debris when disaster struck again.
He threw off a bunch of bricks and was trying to heave his downed TV antenna off the steeply sloped roof when the antenna hooked his shirt and pulled him off, too.
He landed on the brick pile. His body lay twisted, the antenna still clutching him.
"I was scared, because I felt no pain," he says.
Doctors told him he had two broken vertebrae.
For several days, he had no feeling below his belly, and no control of his bodily functions.
The night before an operation to place a metal plate in his back, Karampatsos turned to the Almighty.
"I just prayed and prayed," he recalls. "I was so scared."
While in supplication, he felt intense pain surge through his body.
"That wasn't supposed to be part of the prayer," he says. But afterward, he could move his legs.
Excited, he called the orderly. And the next day, when his doctor came to see him, Karampatsos had made a sign to greet him that said, "PTLPTU." Asked what it meant, he replied, "Praise the Lord, I'm passing the urine."
The doctor, he says, told him, "All I know is yesterday you needed an operation, today you don't. He was confused ... very happy, but confused."
Karampatsos was happy, too, and he lived that way for the next 14 years until his marriage broke up. Looking for a fresh start, he moved to North Carolina, where a friend lived.
Living in China Grove, he went to work for Polar Plastics in Mooresville. He started jogging again, the first time he'd done that in years.
He ran a 10K in Charlotte, though he admits "I didn't even know what 'K' was."
Life was improving until somebody ran over his foot with a forklift at work. The accident broke his toe and put him out of work, and running, for six months.
When he got on his feet again, Karampatsos got on a treadmill. Then he joined the Salisbury-Rowan Runners Club and started entering other local races.
He did well, and that surprised him, since he hadn't run competitively in so long.
"I'm still surprised," he says. "I think that's why I'm having so much fun. I'm curious what's going to happen."
Karampatsos ran his first marathon in 2001 in Philadelphia. He chose it because he was going to visit his son there, a son who had given up a well-paying job to become a minister.
"He inspired me," Karampatsos says, and he wanted to return the inspiration. "I thought, 'I've gotta pick something big to do. I'll run an marathon.'"
Because of his previous injuries, Karampatsos checked with a doctor before running the race. If he could stand the pain, the doctor said, he could do it.
Pushing aside doubts, he did it. As he ran, he thought about the time he spent in a wheelchair, the doctors who told he may not walk, much less run, again.
"I was in constant prayer," he says.
He finished the 26.2 miles in under four hours, a great time for which he credits God.
"I was just so happy that I finished," he says. "I had to do the running, but ... it took a lot of healing to get me to that start line."
Karampatsos never intended to run a second marathon. But he found shorter races less challenging afterward, and he found himself looking for an outlet during a troubled second marriage.
So in 2003, he ran another marathon in Abingdon, Va. in a March snowstorm. He ran his third in Nashville, Tenn., in April of that year.
"I was only doing one a month back then," he says.
He's picked up the pace considerably, running 26 marathons in 23 states so far. Fulfilling a dream from his youth, he completed the Boston Marathon in April.
It's gotten harder to travel since he had to quit his job a year and a half ago. The arthritis in his back and limbs has gnarled his hands and he can't use them for manual labor anymore. On top of that, the pills he takes for his headaches cost $17 apiece.
To save money, he'll drive to a marathon and stay in a motel the night before, then run the race and drive back home without sleeping. He went 23 hours without sleep after the New York City race.
He runs with pain each time, but Karampatsos says he can't see not crossing a finish line, no matter how it hurts.
"I think of Christ going up the hill to Calvary. He was in so much pain he had to have help carrying the cross, but he got to the top of the hill," Karampatsos says. "And he not only made it to the top of the hill, he completed the course, all the way to cross. Then he said 'It is finished.'"
"That was the toughest course," he says. "To me, the thought of giving up a race is too symbolic."
In his small, spare Salisbury apartment that he says looks more like a dorm room is plenty of evidence that he does not give up: pictures of him running in races, marathon souvenirs and some of the 120 or so trophies and medals he's won the past four years.
Most of those prizes he's given to people he loves.
Karampatsos draws inspiration from a lot of people: his daughter, Heather, who lost her leg to cancer at the age of 12, but still exercises and walks in races; Al Lawson, a friend who has a hard time breathing but finished the New York race with him; Ed Frye, a local Ironman competitor who's also overcome injuries.
And he inspires others. Dr. Andrew Jeter, his chiropractor, jokingly calls Karampatsos a "freak of nature."
"He's just an amazing guy," Jeter says. "He's got a strong will and he's got an incredible outlook on life."
Jeter says it's rare to see someone with Karampatsos' history of injuries do what he does. In fact, when asked how many of his patients with similar conditions run marathons, he said "none."
"I just think running makes his life complete, and I think if you took him out of running, it would cause him serious decline, because he loves it so much," he says. "It makes him whole."
It's even more, Karampatsos says.
Running is a spiritual time.
"You're by yourself," he says. "You're in a crowd, but still by yourself. The only one you know is God."
It is a time to silently reach out. He prays for runners around him.
And it is his mission field, a place to share the message he treasures most.
He recalls running an 8K race at Reed Gold Mine in Cabarrus County. He saw another runner, a Korean man in a teacher-exchange program, by the side of the course, in trouble.
Karampatsos says he heard that same firm, loving voice that once told him to get up off the ground and walk now telling him to stop and talk with the young man.
He knew he was running well in the race.
"I didn't want to stop, I really didn't," he says. "But I did."
He prayed for the man, helped him get back on the course, and prayed for the man again when he stopped a second time. The man, in his 20s, finished 7th. Karampatsos finished 8th.
He would like to have placed higher, yet after the race, "I had the chance to share the Gospel with him," he says. "What a perfect opportunity."
It won't be his last chance to share his passion and faith.
Karampatsos, who has published two books, is working on one now that compares running to living a Christian life.
And later, after he completes races in all 50 states and Washington, which he hopes to do next year, he wants to compete in Ironman competitions. He's praying for the money to buy a bike.
For now, he'll keep running. He'll pray through the pain, and he will go with God.
"I dream of flying," he says, "and when I'm running I'm flying ..."
They shall mount up with wings like eagles ...
"And I just claim that promise."

For further information, contact Scott Jenkins at 704-797-4248 or sjenkins@salisburypost.com. 
©2006, The Salisbury Post