From the time she was three years old, Perry Louis Fields has wanted to be the world's fastest runner. Now 30, the US Track and Field competitor says she's training at the top of her game. What makes her athletic success so sublime? Perry's torturous encounter with Lyme disease in 2003, which she says she has now beat.

"I’m not only healthy," says Perry. "I’m healthier than I was before I was bitten (no kidding!). My training and racing proves that. I’m the fastest and strongest I’ve ever been."

Beneath Perry's easygoing persona and her honey-toned Southern accent, she has a fiercely competitive nature. After enduring a miserable four or five month period of powerful antibiotics, she decided to quit the conventional route and devote what little energy she had to researching and finding "the cure," as she calls it. Although her symptoms "made every day a nightmare," she willed herself to begin taking baby steps toward getting back to her goal of running again.

With the dedication and steel determination of a true winner, Perry achieved her dream of not only running, but training as a pro once again.

"What Lance Armstrong did for cancer, I hope to do for Lyme disease. I have sometimes told myself that I wish I had cancer rather than Lyme. Someone with terminal cancer may feel otherwise, but I’m truly upset that the research on this disease is so inconclusive. The treatment for Lyme is inconclusive. It’s like nobody has had any experience with it at all, yet hundreds of thousands of people get it every year (I think that number is more like millions.)"

LDRD members can login and listen to Perry tell her inspiring story about beating Lyme. For Perry's website, please go to beatlyme.com.

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