WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — All his life, Brig Edwards says he has been ”ultra competitive.”

Varsity basketball player in high school.

National-level collegiate cyclist.

Olympic-style power weightlifter.

For the married 52-year-old Palm Beach Gardens father of two, athletic competition and serious training have been his lifeblood.

Until a 2004 cycling accident nearly made them his death knell.

The accident

Though Edwards, an engineer and commercial real estate appraiser, has no memory of the accident, here is what he has been able to piece together of the incident from the accounts of others:

While he was cycling in the bicycle lane, a vehicle suddenly swerved in front of him, then made a sudden stop.

”I crashed face first into the windshield,” Edwards says.

Among his catastrophic injuries: two broken vertebra, a broken nose, a broken jaw, a broken orbital bone and damage to his eyes and throat.

The accident happened about a mile from a fire station, so paramedics arrived quickly.

”If not for the actions of those first responders, I would have died on the scene,” he says.

As it was, Edwards spent nearly two weeks in the hospital — and then more than two years undergoing numerous reconstructive surgeries.

He required a series of bone and skin grafts to facilitate repair of the facial, dental, nerve and orthopedic damage.

To this day, he can’t blink voluntarily (calibrated microscopic ”weights” sewn into his eyelids force it to happen) and still suffers periodic double vision.

Even so, not long after the accident — while still fitted with a tracheal tube and defying doctors’ orders — Edwards sheepishly recalls, ”I started doing some stationary cycling at home.”

Needing a new outlet

Several months into his recovery, he tried outdoor cycling again.

However, the vision problems — combined with the fact Edwards’ cycling outdoors was too nerve-wracking for his wife, Heidi, and their children, Brandon and Macayla — meant, he says, ”I had to find something new.”

In 2005, he discovered CrossFit.

”It was an underground thing back then,” Edwards recalls. ”The workouts were posted online, and I did them in my garage.”

Despite the worldwide growth of the sport — and the opening of dozens of nearby CrossFit gyms (or ”boxes” as they’re colloquially known) — Edwards still trains solely in his home gym.

By 2010, he was itching to compete again, so he began entering local CrossFit events.

He did so well, he moved on to state events, then sectional and regional ones.

Though the qualifying process is arduous, the last few years he’s met the requirements needed to compete in the master’s division of the Reebok CrossFit Games — the sport’s ”world championships,” held annually and televised live on ESPN.

Over three days in July, Edwards performed well enough in the vast array of exercises — everything from overhead presses, barbell squats and pull-ups to weighted sled pulls, walking handstands, 20-foot rope climbs and much more — to earn second place in the men’s 50-54-year-old division.

”You never know what you’ll have to do until you’re on the starting line,” Edwards says. ”That’s part of the fun — and challenge.”

On Saturday, Edwards and local first responders will lend their CrossFit skills to the First Responders Team Challenge. Proceeds will benefit the Place of Hope at the Haven Campus in Boca Raton, an around-the-clock facility that cares for foster children.

“CrossFit has changed my life,” Edwards says. “And now I hope Saturday’s event can help it improve the lives of others.”