Two years ago, Ettinger mangled herself and her bike while racing for the University of Oregon in the NCAA cycling nationals.

With a broken right arm, several broken fingers and a fractured tibia, Ettinger nevertheless sat out of physical activity for only one month.

And now, two years later, Ettinger is back on the running race scene.

One could speculate that she does not let much stand in her way.

While still recovering from all of her injuries, her hands swollen to the size of a child’s baseball mitt, a brace on her left leg and sutures at various places from head to toe, Ettinger started riding her bike to work again. This was in Eugene, while she was attending law school at the University of Oregon.

“I had to get a new bike because mine was just destroyed,” Ettinger explains. “Just getting on it in the parking lot made me nervous. … I was terrified of falling over and ripping everything open.”

Eventually, she recalls, she had to let go of her fear.

“We lived on the top of a hill (in Eugene),” she says. “It was a steep hill.”

At first she would drive in her car with the bike down the big hill, making sure no one was watching, then she would take off peddling. But one day she just went for it.

“You’re afraid to fail and your biggest setback becomes you. … Coming down one of the big hills on your bike for the first time after something like that, letting go is really hard. But then once you do it you feel so good for having done it. And you want to do it again.”

Ettinger’s accomplishments run a gamut. Her most recent success was winning the women’s division of the Capital City Half Marathon last month in Olympia, Wash., where she was the fifth finisher overall.

It was just her second half-marathon competition ever and her first race of any kind since the crash in 2007.

During her junior year at La Grande High School, at the age of 17, Ettinger competed at the world championships for cross-country running (6-kilometer distance) in Morocco.

“I was just excited to be doing it,” says Ettinger. “I never thought I would ever do it professionally. I just thought it was my sport and I loved doing it and I had a great time doing it. I would meet a lot of really interesting people. I don’t think I ever focused on the ‘Where am I going to go with this?’ I was just kind of hoping college.”

That same year, 1998, Ettinger took the Intermountain Conference District Championship title for cross country, won the western regional competition for high school cross-country running and was the runner-up at the Foot Locker National Cross Country Championships in Orlando, Fla.

“That was a really great year,” says Ettinger. “That was the year that everything kind of clicked. It was my second solid year of running.”

After high school and a brief stint at the U.S. Olympic Training Center for cross-country running near San Diego, Ettinger entered undergraduate school at Stanford University.

There, she ran for the NCAA Division I women’s cross-country team.

“Stanford was great academically for me,” she says. “But in terms of athletics it was not a place I excelled very well. The pressure was different. … It didn’t turn out to be very much fun. … I kind of had forgotten that I was doing it for me. I was doing it for other people.”

Her first triathlon was the 2002 Pacific Crest long-course triathlon in Sunriver. Ettinger, then 21, won the women’s 20-24 division and was the fifth female overall.

“I kind of got the triathlon bug after that,” she says with a grin.

Between Stanford and law school, Ettinger took a year off to race triathlons and was invited to the National Training Center, a sports, health, fitness and education campus located in Clermont, Fla. This time she was training for triathlons.

Ettinger has won a few long-course triathlon national titles, and in 2003 she competed in the Queenstown ITU Triathlon World Championships in New Zealand where she place 15th out of 97 female finishers. She completed the race despite a stress fracture at the head of her femur. In 2005, she qualified for the world championships again, but she did not compete due to the demands of law school.

It was during law school at the University of Oregon that she started competing more seriously in cycling competitions at the national level. Then came that horrific crash.

With only two years of cycling at the NCAA level, Ettinger took second at the 2007 Western Regional Championship in Washington.

Ettinger hopes to continue to make her way back into racing.

Working an average of 60 hours a week as an attorney at Hurley-Re Attorneys at Law in Bend doesn’t allow much time to train. But she is looking ahead to the 2009 Pacific Crest Half Marathon, to be held June 27 in Sunriver.

If all goes well, Ettinger says she will race a half-Ironman triathlon this year and possibly a 20K running race.

“Right now,” says Ettinger, “I want to find that love for competing again, do well at it. But most of all I want to have fun and stay healthy doing it.”

Driven in so many facets of her life, Ettinger is not serious in demeanor. She is playful, and she is quick to share childhood anecdotes and the silly games she would play with her younger brother, Luke.

She loves family.

“My dad (Chip Ettinger of La Grande) is my rock and my best friend,” she says.

She values the time she shares with her grandparents, Richard and Marjorie Ettinger, on their Bend ranch.

Though Ettinger has experienced considerable success in her young life, she is willing to share her weaknesses, too.

“The one thing I always wished I could do, but really sucked at, was art. I never had an art,” she admits with a subtle laugh. “Maybe my art is running.”

Katie Brauns can be reached at 541-383-0393 or at kbrauns@bendbulletin.com.