When able-bodied triathletes and triathlon fans see a wheelchair triathlete round the last corner, finish-line applause lifts to an emotional pitch. We want them to know how much we respect what they’ve overcome and what they’re doing.
But this is where we usually draw the line in thinking about it. We may know firsthand about the rigors of being an Ironman, but it’s impossible to meaningfully imagine life, training and racing in the physically challenged division. Maybe we don’t think deeper on it because we know it would be ridiculously presumptuous; maybe we don’t think about it because every time we’re out on a long bike ride, there’s a close call with a pickup truck and we can’t deny the fact that over the edge of the definition of close call is a world where being paraplegic is lucky. Maybe we just don’t know what to say.
The uneasiness triathletes feel was illustrated when Jim MacLaren gave a speech at the Hawaii Ironman after a second life-changing accident. In the first, he’d lost a leg after he was hit by a bus when he was on his motorcycle in New York. Then when he was 30, during the bike leg of a San Diego triathlon, he was struck by a van when crossing an intersection. He broke his neck and was left quadriplegic.
Elizabeth Gilbert, in a compelling article on MacLaren published in GQ, chronicled the moment:
About a year after his accident, he made a difficult voyage to Hawaii to speak before a convention of Ironman athletes. He was wheeled out onstage to a standing ovation. When the applause finally died down, Jim began with, of all things, a dark joke: ‘For years I sat out there in that audience and listened to the best Ironman champions in the world speak from this very podium. I always wondered what it would take for a guy like me to be invited up here. I never realized it would be so simple — all I had to do was break my neck.’
There was a bone-chilling silence.
Jim thought, ‘Whoops...’
Within the article, Gilbert detailed the agonies, both physical and mental, that MacLaren had suffered through. How it was far from over, and how it’s never over. You only begin to see the strength and endurance of Jim MacLaren in how he painstakingly works it out in his head on a daily basis. Seeing so deeply into his situation he knows what happened to him was an extreme case of a blessing in disguise.
Two-time PC division champ Carlos Moleda talked about the same struggle. “I have mornings where I wake up and it’s like, ‘Damn, I want to go for a run.’”
It’s fair to say, albeit from a distance, that physically disabled athletes are on the most intimate terms with the ultimate personal goal of the Ironman: self-knowledge. It’s fun to hear the cheers and to blow a few minds in the workplace when you tell them about what you were up to last weekend in Lake Placid.
But we know the real value, the real stuff, lies in driving ourselves through the low moments of an Ironman, past the inner voice egging us on to quit. It’s in these times we get a glimpse of our own weaknesses and strengths, and maybe a bit of real understanding about fighting the great daily fight in the physically challenged division.
The day I first witnessed the athletic drama that unfolds in the PC division was in Lubbock, Texas, during a June heat wave in the late 1990s. I’d interviewed the winners of the Buffalo Springs Lake Half-Ironman and was finishing up my day’s work by taking some photos out on the course.
It was a 110-degree day. At least. It was the kind of heat that melts the life out of you the moment you walk out of the air-conditioning. Triathletes were making it to the finish line thanks to race directors Mike and Marti Greer’s wizardry in making ice stay ice under the fire of fierce temperatures. Still, watching the athletes survive the day was one of the more awesome displays I had witnessed as a triathlon journalist.
But the most awesome was yet to come. With a sun burning as if it was 100 feet above, I was standing near the top of a steep climb on the run course. The Greers take delight in surprising out-of-towners with the truth about West Texas: it’s flat, but not all flat. This particular climb was wicked steep, and the blacktop, the black cooked out of it, burned to stand on right through your shoes. But with my attention caught by the strain of two athletes, both climbing up the hill in wheelchairs, I didn’t feel a thing.
The angle of the incline made it so the panting athletes lost sizeable chunks of ground after each push, in the brief instant they were forced to release their grip on the hand rims. The stillness of the day made it like breathing inside a hot-air balloon, and they rasped for oxygen. Yet, they weren’t just lasting out the hill, they were racing each other for a slot to the Hawaii Ironman.
Until that moment, I really hadn’t paid much attention to the division. If you’re watching an Ironman, usually your attention is focused on the drama at the front of the race, and within that, you have a good idea about what the rest of the pack is going through. It’s easy to give only a glancing thought to the journey wheelchair athletes have made just to get to the starting line. In interviews with competitors like Willie Stewart, an above-the-elbow amputee, who lost most of his arm in a construction accident, becoming a PC triathlete isn’t something they jump into after leaving the hospital.
“The two years after the accident, I didn’t do a thing,” Stewart said. “I had to face my own preconceptions of what it meant to be disabled. I figured since I’d lost my arm that I was destined to just be an office boy somewhere. But things changed when I found the confidence I needed to be seen in public.”
David Bailey, a world-class motorcycle racer before he was paralyzed in a bike accident, said he too went through the same sort of psychological ordeal.
The man who would become Bailey’s chief rival, Moleda, a Navy SEAL, paralyzed after he was shot in combat, first had to get through nine months of intense rehabilitation before he could even start thinking about any type of comeback in a wheelchair.
After coming to grips with things and deciding to revive the athlete within, things only get tougher. Stewart, for example, decided he wanted to do a Half-Ironman, and had to figure out how to swim.
“The first time I got in the pool, it was ridiculous. I barely made it to the other end. When I got there I said, “How in the hell am I going to swim 1.2 miles?” And using a handcycle and wheelchair in the heat of competition — heat both literal and figurative — becomes an especially daunting task when the road curls upward. In 1994, Australia’s John McLean, the first physically challenged athlete to beat the strict bike cut-off time at the Hawaii Ironman, did so after Palani Hill caused him to throw up three times.
When Moleda — who would win two division championships in Hawaii — first started training for the Ironman, he was dumbstruck. After finishing 100-mile training rides, he’d sit, stunned, pouring water over his head and feeling “half-dead.”
Bailey tells a story about finishing one of his more demanding brick workouts in San Diego, in preparation for his 3rd clash with Moleda. He was so worked that when drivers honked their horns at him in encouragement, he thought “Shut up. Just leave me alone.”
It’s easy to rubber stamp the stories that come out of the physically challenged division as “inspirational” and leave it at that. But there’s a great deal we can learn from our fellow athletes who’ve had to improvise an altered version of triathlon. For one thing, if mental strength is the foundation for success in the Ironman, these are the masters.
David Bailey’s and Carlos Moleda’s three-year battle in Hawaii was proof of this. For another thing — and perhaps most importantly — to squeeze meaning out of triathlon and to keep our egos and perspectives in check, we can learn a lot from the words of MacLaren and the others. Like in MacLaren’s explanation to GQ of how he came to terms with his disability:
“I have honestly come to believe that I needed these accidents in my life. I completely believe that. Not in terms of paying dues or getting punished by God, but in terms of getting my attention and bringing me deeper inside myself to a place where I could find honesty and peace. Was it destined? Did I literally choose to have these awful things happen to me? No, not in so many words, I don’t believe so. But I do believe this — I believe I was born begging for experiences that would show me who I really am. And that’s what I’ve been given.”