One More Step: My Story of Living with Cerebral Palsy, Climbing Kilimanjaro, and Surviving the Hardest Race on Earth

by Bonner Paddock

  By Mile 20, I was on my own, with 6 more miles to go. The physical pain was like nothing I had experienced before. My feet felt as though they were covered by a thousand blisters that had been cut open and rubbed raw. My ankles, knees, and hips felt as if battery acid had been poured into them. My calves were clutched in a pincer grip. With the pain came a strange kind of warmth, a sensation I hadn’t felt before. I wondered how much damage—permanent damage—I was inflicting on my body.

  I thought about slowing down, pulling up short of the finish, quitting altogether. Such thoughts were quickly replaced with mutterings: “Screw it. Ruin my body? I don’t care.”

  Strangers were cheering from the side of the road, but their words were white noise, lost to me. I almost felt as if I were about to black out. Everything was getting foggy, distant. Still I ran, forcing myself to stare at the pavement ahead of me to keep from crashing. Over and over I thought about Jake, how I couldn’t quit on him. I pictured his face. I remembered how Steve carried him across the finish line. Somehow my feet kept moving.

  Near the end of the race, I heard the cheers rise to a roar. “Way to do it for Jake!” someone along the sidelines said. My eyes cleared. Ahead, on the right, Tyler and Zach Robert hollered and rooted me onward. I was going to make it.

  Crossing the finish line, I seemed to cry and smile at the same time. My whole body went weak. Friends gathered me up and helped me out of the chute. Steve and his family were there. He gave me a big bear hug. “Awesome job,” he said. “I love you, man.” My dad had showed up as well to congratulate me.

  Later, Team Jake visited the hillside cemetery overlooking the marathon course, where Jake was buried next to his grandfather. On the branches of the willow tree beside his grave, Steve, Alison, and their boys hung their medals. Too debilitated to join them, I returned home and curled up in a bed I would barely leave for the next three days. When the exhaustion and agony gripping my whole lower body eased enough to stand without gritting my teeth, I started to think about what came next.

  4

  The Mountain

  Eighteen thousand crazed fans waving orange towels? Check. Six hundred bottles of Korbel Champagne on ice? Check. A six-week-old playoff beard, just like the one our players were wearing? Check. The moment had arrived. Now all the Anaheim Ducks had to do was beat the Ottawa Senators to claim the Stanley Cup.

  It was June 6, 2007, and I was pacing the tunnel that led to the action on the ice, too crazy with nerves to watch the game or to converse with our sponsors. Four minutes into the third period the fans went wild, screaming loud enough to blow off the roof. I hopped and jumped into the arena as the Ducks players on the ice celebrated their now 5–2 lead over the Senators. This baby was over. Sixteen minutes later, another goal from the Ducks, and we had won the finals. Everyone on the staff hugged and congratulated each other.

  The coaches, players, and owners all came out to join us. Henry Samueli raised the Stanley Cup over his head with the captains by his side. “We are Stanley Cup Champions! How cool is that?!” he declared. Following tradition, the players drank from the big silver chalice. But then, breaking with tradition, our owner passed the cup around to everyone who worked for the Ducks. There I was, Stanley Cup in hand, guzzling Champagne. The party lasted all night, and just before dawn a car dropped me off at home. Once inside the front door, I stripped off my Champagne-soaked suit and stumbled upstairs, a big smile on my face.

  Grasping the Stanley Cup further fueled this feeling I had after the marathon that nothing was beyond my reach, and I needed to show it by attacking an even greater challenge than running 26.2 miles. The marathon had freed me forever of the need to hide my disability from others and proven a good way to raise awareness about and funds for children with CP who were battling to survive—and thrive—in their own bodies. And although that was certainly a motivation for my next adventure—and the one I planned on sharing with others—it was not the motivation for wanting to put my body through another torture test, whatever form it took.

  There was something else, a need, a dark hunger, that drove me to achieve anything, everything, that others could achieve, no matter how hard I needed to push myself or the risk involved. In a way, it was no different than when I was a sixteen-year-old kid on the basketball court, trying to swoop around my faster, more agile competitors and leaping after impossible rebounds to prove I was every bit as able as they were. Once that had left me rolling in agony on the pavement after snapping in half both bones in my left forearm, but I had blocked that out, along with a lot of other things.

  The origins of this hunger—where it came from and how it could be satisfied—were not exactly staring me in the face; that would have taken a lot more self-awareness than I had back then. In truth, I didn’t even understand enough to pose the questions. The only one I was asking was what. What could I do next? Ultramarathons didn’t grab me, particularly after 26 miles had almost shattered my legs to dust. There was no time for a long, cross-country Forrest Gump walk either.

  One night during the summer I watched a Discovery documentary on Everest, but I felt that climbing that terrible Himalayan beast was begging for disaster, no matter one’s abilities. Still, summiting mountains certainly made for fine drama and a punishing physical test. That might be the right avenue to explore. Then I began quickly researching other peaks. Soon I had mine.

  Kilimanjaro. The tallest mountain in Tanzania. The tallest mountain in Africa. And given its volcanic formation, the tallest free-standing mountain in the world. Uhuru Peak rose unimpeded from the surrounding level plain to a height of 19,340 feet. Only about a third of the twenty thousand people who braved the climb every year made it, and a handful died every year in the attempt. A wild goal, yes, but in the realm of possibility, and nobody with cerebral palsy had ever summited the peak by the power of their own two legs. Kilimanjaro was ideal.

  Wanting to make a big splash, I waited for the annual UCP-OC fund-raising gala, where I was being honored with an award for my marathon run, to make my Kilimanjaro announcement. Friends and even my whole family, Mom and Dad included, gathered. I concluded my acceptance speech with some unscripted words that seemed to come out of nowhere, up from inside of me.

  “We have a choice in our lives. We can be content with where we are, or we can set goals and continue to push ourselves beyond our limits. I’m ready to keep doing that. I want to be the first person with cerebral palsy to climb the tallest free-standing mountain in the world.”

  Initial shock, then a roar of applause followed.

  Afterward, I wanted to escape the stage, but the UCP foundation had arranged for the emcee to help jump-start the fund-raising. He asked me to stand beside him, and then asked the audience, “Who wants to donate for this guy?”

  Cheers rang out.

  “Let’s get this thing rolling,” the emcee said, playing the auctioneer in every way except for banging the gavel, and I was the object of the bids.

  “Okay, let’s start at $25,000. Who wants to kick this off? Anybody? Anybody?”

  The first bid was $10,000. By the end of the night, I had raised over $50,000, and there was no turning back.

  Up until that time, my only experience with climbing had been the annual church hike up to Sturtevant Falls in my teens. One year, I decided to win the Best Hiker award. I raced up and back down the small state-park mountain, fast as I could. That was more than two decades earlier and, needless to say, Sturtevant Falls was many orders of magnitude smaller than Kilimanjaro. Not that I knew exactly how many, since most of my research on the climb was limited to Wikipedia entries and YouTube videos. It was clear, however, that to reach the top of Uhuru Peak would require long days of hiking and steep climbing at high altitudes with low oxygen, confronted by wind and freezing cold at every turn. We would have to carry heavy backpacks, to bunk down at night in tents, and to make for the top of Kilimanjaro in the pitch-dark when the unpredictable weather was at its most predictable (apparently the really bad storms us
ually hit in the afternoon or early evening).

  I would need a team and training. One of the first calls I made was to Paul Flores, a former roommate of mine in San Diego. Paul was Mexican American, with long black hair pulled back in a ponytail, who spoke in “dudes” and “bros.” He was born in southern California, but after his older brothers were told they needed to choose between joining either the Crips or the Bloods, their parents moved them to Grantsville, Utah. Grantsville was a middle-of-nowhere kind of town with a thousand people and few Hispanics, so Paul learned to fight at a young age. His father was a Vietnam veteran, but it was his mother who taught him how to box.

  Ignored by his teachers at the local public school, Paul managed to reach the eleventh grade without being able to read. A tutor fixed that, and he got straight As thereafter until graduation. Unsure of his future—what to do, how to pay for college—he called up an army recruiter. In April 1994, he started basic training at Fort Benning.

  Paul’s brother was in the same platoon, and they both ended up in the Rangers. Already tough and fearless from his hardscrabble childhood, Paul became tougher still. He served as an ammo bearer for the gunners in the weapons squad and rightly earned his nickname, the “Iron Horse.” It was not unusual for him to hike out on exercises with 120 pounds on his back—everything from the regular kit to tripod mounts, spare barrels, night-vision gear, and 50 pounds of ammunition.

  Paul’s philosophy was, “If you know somebody is going to hit you, you hit him first.” A bad brawl, a bum charge for smoking marijuana off duty, and an independent streak too wide for military life saw Paul back in Utah a few years later. He tried college at Utah State, but got mixed up in drugs. Realizing he was heading down a wrong path, he quit and left for Salt Lake City. He mowed lawns and began rock climbing with a friend. Soon he was hitting the mountains every weekend and during the winter too. He trained to become a massage therapist and found himself working on a few Olympic skaters. A girl led Paul to San Diego. He worked as a bartender, a server, and even a chef and had an apartment next to mine. Soon after we met we ripped down the fence that separated our apartments.

  Paul was easy to like. He surfed and partied, he had a mystical calm, and there was never any doubt he had your back. I called Paul one day to see if he wanted to meet up for a drink. At the time, he was working over seventy hours a week just to stay afloat.

  Paul told me, “I can’t. Don’t have any money.”

  I replied, “Paul, I’m calling to hang out with you. If we sit on my couch, watch TV, that’s cool. I just want to spend time with you.”

  He later told me that I had earned his friendship for life that day.

  Paul moved back to Utah, got married, found a job working maintenance at a smelter outside Salt Lake City, and kept up his love of climbing. When I called him about Kilimanjaro, he said immediately, “I’m in.” If things went bad for me on the mountain, I knew that Paul would hoist me on his back and carry me down.

  Through Paul, I met Tim Geiss, who organized hikes and mountain summits around the world. He volunteered to lead our expedition and set fall 2008 as the date for our climb. When he asked if I needed any special gear or training for the climb because of my CP, I simply said, “I’m fine. I’m good like everybody else.” And I believed it.

  While Paul began training in Utah in early spring, I hit the hills and canyons around Newport Beach—short hikes during the week, long ones on the weekend, following my own improvised schedule based on the informational packets Tim sent to everyone.

  A few times I asked my brother Mike to come along on a weekend hike. Although he lived only 10 miles away, I rarely saw him more than a couple of times a year. I knew he liked to hike, so I hoped it might be a good way to reconnect. Either he never got back to me until it was too late, or he said he would join me and then didn’t show up. Finally, I stopped calling. I tried to get my other brother, Matt, to join me for the climb itself, but he begged off because he had a young kid.

  Slowly our team filled out, an odder collection of folks than have probably ever made the attempt together. Tim Geiss was team leader. A wiry, youthful forty-five-year-old, he was a flight attendant for Delta, but his sideline was leading these kinds of tours. Jayson “Dilly” Dilworth, my other roommate from San Diego, who now lived in Austin, Texas, was a joker, a Botox salesman, and, as we sometimes joked, the redneck version of me. Nancy Sinclair was the oldest of the group. She was head of marketing for one of the Ducks’ sponsors and had climbed Mt. Whitney four decades earlier. Her granddaughter had CP. Rick White was a late addition to the team. He booked a plane ticket to the wrong continent—we called him Magellan. Last but not least, Shirley Ala was a physician’s assistant and backcountry skier Paul knew from Utah.

  As far as I could see, we were the ideal team. Tim was the expert, Paul the mystical warrior. Dilly was the comic relief, Shirley the healer, Nancy the grandmother. And Rick . . . Well, at least we knew who not to follow on the mountain. I was the rallying point, the reason, I hoped, why the others would keep pushing if they decided they didn’t want to do it for themselves.

  There is the grand dome or crater of Kibo [Uhuru], with its snowcap glancing and scintillating like burnished silver on its eastern flank. . . . What words can adequately describe this glimpse of majestic grandeur and godlike repose?

  Tim included this dreamy quote from early explorer Joseph Thomson in one of the prep packs he sent out five months before we left for Africa. It sounded fabulous. But he also detailed the dangers involved for us on the mountain. Beyond suffering potential hypothermia and altitude sickness, we faced the possibility of acute mountain sickness, whose symptoms included nausea and vomiting; high-altitude cerebral edema, indicated by profound lethargy and manifest confusion; and—worst of all—high-altitude pulmonary edema, indicated by bluish skin color, shortness of breath, and rapid heart rate, which, if it went on too long and excess fluid filled the lungs, could cause death.

  Never once confronting the notion that I might be more susceptible to these risks than anybody else, I put them aside and kept training. When I got to the mountain, I figured I’d be just another climber working to make it to the top. In April, I climbed Mt. Baldy in the San Gabriel Mountains outside Los Angeles. We started fairly high up, and it took four hours to reach the summit at 10,064 feet. The final half hour involved hiking up a steep ridge. I felt my heartbeat in my eardrums and knew I was hitting my body’s limits. But I made it up and learned two valuable lessons. First, I needed to use hiking poles on my next climb, because I kept losing my balance on the trail; and, second, I was a long way from ready for Kilimanjaro.

  On the upside, my mission to summit one of the “Seven Sisters” was gathering a lot more attention and funds than I could have imagined. Originally, I had hoped to raise $100,000 for UCP. Donations rolled in at a quick and steady pace throughout the summer, everything from big checks to little ones. Some of the smaller ones meant the most, like the one from a boy who sold his bike to give $50 to my campaign. Local magazines and newspapers featured stories about me, accelerating the fund-raising even more. Through my work with the Ducks, I got huge support from my sponsors for the climb. Toyo Tires, Oakley, Herbalife, and Young’s Market Company all donated either money or equipment for our team. By late summer, I had raised close to a quarter of a million dollars.

  In June, three young filmmakers who had just graduated from Chapman University’s film school threw in with our team. They wanted to shoot a documentary about my attempt. It was a haphazard, last-minute addition, but they were committed. The same day we met, two of them, Mitch McIntire and Kent Bassett, borrowed some of my clothes and joined me on a hike. Everything was coming together, by both my intent and chance.

  Three weeks before leaving for Africa, I set out on my big training climb: Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain in the lower forty-eight states. Coming with me were Mitch, who was tall and thickly built, and Kent, who was thin and wiry like a long-distance runner. We started out at 3:30 A.M
. Even with my new headlamp (and new boots and hiking poles), it was disorienting trying to follow the trail with the small beam of light, a warning signal of what I would face at night on Kilimanjaro.

  At 6:15 A.M., the sun rose, casting the Sierra Nevada range in a beautiful yellow and red haze. We crossed a stream by a single-log bridge. I barely managed. Then it was onward and upward. Hour after hour, I dragged my feet up the trail, pushing down hard on my hiking poles to compensate for my weak legs. None of us had brought enough water, and we were desperately thirsty. Wearing new boots was a tragic mistake: my feet blistered, and my ankles hurt. Near the tree line, we stopped at a stunning mountain lake and tried to catch our breath before beginning on the series of ninety-nine switchbacks that would take us to the top at 14,505 feet. The trail turned into a scramble over giant gray rocks. Way up on the ridge, other climbers looked like little ants. Time and again, I thought we were close to the summit, only to realize that we faced yet another switchback. Clouds rolled across the sky, the wind gusted, and I started to get a chill despite the strenuous effort. Over the last few hundred feet, the bones in my feet felt as if they were breaking.

  At the top, we celebrated briefly and ate our lunch on a flat rock. We signed the log book at the stone house at the summit, and then I had to face the fact that now I had to find my way back down. After fifteen hours and over 24 miles of trail, I finally stumbled back to my car. My feet and the tendons in my ankles were shot. My toes, which had been banging into the front of my boots with each step, felt broken. Driving home, my legs stiffening with each passing minute, I worried that I had done myself a serious injury. More than that, I feared how I was going to manage eight days in a row of such hikes on a mountain higher than this one by almost a mile.