Such plans Nicole Young made for her 40th year. She could hardly wait. In fact, she chose not to. She ramped up her running and bike training early last October so that, by the time the Big 4-0 hit in March, she'd be in prime shape to dominate her new age group.

"I figured, this is the year I'm on top of my game," said Young, a distance runner and triathlete. "I'm just really going to go all-out and kick butt."

Fate, in the form of an overlooked rock on a dirt trail, had other plans. A simple six-mile out-and-back training run near her Shingle Springs home on Oct. 21 changed her life. Nearly ended it, actually.

Young, a two-time defending ironwoman champion of Eppie's Great Race, had just made the turn on the El Dorado Trail and needed to hustle back to pick up her two kids from school. She tripped on a rock and gouged her left knee. Nothing major, she thought. Didn't even hurt. Yeah, it took three stitches to close it later at a drop-in clinic. But Young's an endurance athlete, so she's used to scrapes.

Four days later, a fast-moving antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection, whose genesis was in that seemingly innocuous knee injury, nearly killed her. She contracted necrotizing fasciitis, more commonly and ghoulishly referred to as "flesh- eating bacteria." Five surgeries over the subsequent eight days – and an aborted sixth that would've resulted in amputation of her left leg – saved her life but left her mostly incapacitated.

Doctors at Mercy San Juan Medical Center told Young, whose kidneys had shut down and whose other organs were compromised during the ordeal, that it might be a year before she could walk again.

So much for those grand plans of a 40-year-old, right?

Well, maybe not.

Less than a month after being discharged, and shortly before the final skin-graft surgery to repair damaged tissue, Young walked. Haltingly. Painfully. Gratefully. By February, she could flex her healing left heel enough to ride her bike. And by March – a week before her 40th birthday – she ran for three minutes.

Recovery has come swiftly – given the severity of her illness – in the months since. Young can run for 45 minutes now and her cycling has almost returned to the form that made her so tough to beat at Eppie's, which features a 5.82-mile run, 12.5-mile bike ride and 6.35-mile paddle in a kayak.

She's not quite ready to compete as an ironwoman, but Young counts it as a personal victory that she will do the cycling leg of an Eppie's relay team. It wasn't until she read the "procedure documents" sent to her from Mercy San Juan that she realized just how close she came to dying.

"It's surreal," said Young, who co-owns a civil engineering firm in Cameron Park. "I don't feel like I'm talking about myself. When I tell people the story, it's like it's out of TV or something. But it hits home when one of the descriptions of me from the hospital was, '39-year-old female who is gravely ill.' "

One of her doctors, critical care and infectious disease specialist Bilal Naseer, calls Young's recovery "amazing" and rare for someone so sick.

"She got to the point where we thought we'd lose her," Naseer said. "She had multi-organ failure, was on a ventilator, was taking three medications to support her heart, her kidneys had failed. She was walking a thin line and could go in either direction. Most patients do not recover from multi-organ failure.

"But one fine day, she started showing improvement. And she just kept getting better. Just talking about her and her recovery makes me happy."

Naseer said "in a lot of cases, necrotic fasciitis is a very subtle infection until it gets bad. Because she was young, healthy and put up a good fight, it wasn't caught earlier with her. The only real confirmatory test for it is when you go to the operating room and open the leg up."

Young said she knew all along that something serious was wrong, because she puffed up "like an Oompa-Loompa from Willie Wonka." She refuses to look at photos of herself from those early days. Kidney dialysis treatments drained 23 liters – nearly 6 gallons – of fluid from her system.

If you didn't see the hip-to-ankle vertical scar on the outside of her left leg or the rounded indentation near her knee where the flesh was decimated, you'd think Young was just another super-fit multisport athlete.

Which she is, once more.

"I'm getting there," she says. "Running is the hardest part. I'd say I'm about 90 percent back (to normal) on the bike, maybe 50 percent running. I don't have a pain, per se, it's more an achiness almost 24/7. It's a tightness like after you finish a marathon. Your legs feel tired and dead."

She may still be somewhat limited physically, but Young doesn't seem at all psychologically fazed. She thinks nothing of going out on the same trail where the fateful rock tripped her up, and she doesn't fear the scourge of all cyclists – road rash.

"It's like being struck by lightning," she said. "Do you not go out in the rain anymore? You take those risks. We risk our lives every day just walking around."

38TH EPPIE'S GREAT RACE

What: A 5.82-mile run, 12.5-mile bike ride and 6.35-mile paddle

When: 8 a.m. Saturday

Where: River Bend Park on the American River Parkway

Registration: Online registration is closed; race-morning registration is available

Information: www.thegreatrace.org

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