by John Maclean
I could not stand the sight of this stranger. He actually scared me. The thought that this could be me forever sent chills down my spine, at least to the T12. Who would ever be interested in me? Would I ever have a wife? Family? What is life going to look like? Once the initial horror wore off, I became more determined than ever that this would not be the end of my story.
These legs would work again.
I would get up out of this wheelchair.
I would regain my old life.
I had passion. I had determination. I was willing to do whatever it took to make my goal a reality.
If only life were so simple.
3
Starting Over
* * *
Four months after my accident I “walked” out of the hospital. It was not, however, the triumphant victory lap I had envisioned. In my mind, I planned to walk out on my own two feet without assistance from anyone or anything. That’s not quite what happened. I wheeled myself into the elevator, where I leaned heavily upon a pair of forearm crutches and pushed myself up from my chair and onto my wobbly legs. When the elevator doors opened to the hospital foyer, I lurched forward on the crutches, my weight supported by my arms. My left leg helped me keep my balance while my right leg, tucked in behind, came along for the ride. I hobbled across the lobby, past the admissions desk, and out the front door. Once outside, I negotiated a slight rise up the footpath to where the car was parked. My dad pushed my chair next to me and I collapsed into it, exhausted and hurting.
Even though my “walk” didn’t quite measure up to what I had imagined, the fact that I left the hospital upright on my feet gave me a great deal of hope. To me, these were the first steps toward turning back the clock and reclaiming my old life. Only four months had passed since the truck ran over me on the highway. If I can walk with crutches already, just think where I will be a couple of years from now, I told myself.
Getting my old life back was not the only thing driving me. I hated life in a wheelchair. I hated the way people looked at me in it. I hated being shorter than everyone else. I hated having to rely on other people to do things for me that I couldn’t do for myself in that dreaded chair. Truth be told, I wanted nothing to do with it. The sooner I could be out of it and on my feet, the happier I would be.
Those who have never lived in a wheelchair have no idea what it is like to suddenly go from being a healthy, strong athlete to a shell of your former self, wheeling about. People stared at me wherever I went. I knew what they had to think of me. I thought it myself. I could see their looks of pity. I could hear their minds ticking off that inevitable, unspoken question on the tips of their tongues: I wonder what happened to you? People do it without thinking. It’s a reflex reaction. A young, otherwise healthy young man in a wheelchair equals a tragedy. I don’t know what was worse: the quizzical, double-take stares or the sad faces brimming with sympathy and concern.
I also hated the new label affixed to me as if it had been tattooed in the middle of my forehead. Officially, I was now disabled. Disabled. Everything about the word repulses me. When you “dis” someone, you speak disrespectfully or critically of them. “Dis” expresses negation, a reversal or absence of an action or state. According to society, all of that and more was now me. I was permanently dissed. The very idea makes me cringe. To be disabled is society’s way of saying quite clearly, “You are less than others. Move aside.” Where I had always approached life with no limits, only possibilities, I now found myself labelled as one with nothing but limitations. I had always prided myself on my speed and agility on the football field and my overall devotion to health and fitness. Many disabled people dream of such things.
My wheelchair embodied “disabled”. The only way out from under the label, I believed, was to regain the use of my legs and tell the chair goodbye forever. So that is what I set out to do. Every morning for two years my dad drove me to a hydrotherapy pool near our home where I did lap after lap. From there it was off to a local gym owned by a friend from my days with the Penrith Panthers, Ron Oaxley. Ron worked as a trainer for the team. After a hard workout at Ron’s gym, it was back to the house for lunch and a nap. More workouts followed in the afternoon. My friend John Young helped put together a makeshift gym in my garage. Johnno welded specialised equipment for me and even wrote my training programs. Most afternoons he came over after work, and the two of us pushed each other the way Colin and I used to.
The training worked, but not in the way I had hoped. Progress with my legs came slowly if at all. I tried to ignore this fact by working my upper body even harder. I soon regained the body mass four months in the hospital had taken away from me. My increased upper body strength made it easier for me to navigate about on my forearm crutches. I say it made it easier, but moving about with the crutches was still not easy. I had moved back to the family home in Tregear and day after day I strapped them to my forearms and set out trying to walk. I cannot count the number of laps I did up and down our street, sweat pouring off me from the effort. My legs still didn’t work any better than the day I left the hospital. The left leg supported a little of my weight while the right still dragged behind as I hobbled along on those crutches. Still, I forced myself to use them as much as possible rather than give in to the chair.
One particular morning I hobbled into Ron’s gym on my crutches. Ron grinned at my progress. “Johnny Mac, I never want to see you in that chair again,” he said. He was trying to encourage me to keep pushing and not let the accident beat me.
“That’s my plan, Ron,” I replied.
However, with each passing day it became more and more clear to me that my plan wasn’t working. It wasn’t just the lack of progress with my legs that discouraged me. Working so hard to get my old life back left me exhausted. Of the first three years after my accident, I probably slept through two of them. Early every evening I stumbled off to bed and slept at least twelve hours every night. Even that wasn’t enough sleep. I napped another two to four hours every single afternoon. I had no choice. My body simply shut down and told me it was going to sleep and I was cordially invited to join it. Life was going on around me while I slept through it.
If I could see progress toward my goal of walking and running again, the exhaustion would be worth it, but in truth, I wasn’t making any. In spite of all the hours and effort I was putting into turning back the clock, I still could not walk in any functional way. I tried to convince myself otherwise. With each hobbling journey on my crutches I told myself I was that much closer to walking, but I knew I was only fooling myself. Not only did my legs not work, but my efforts to walk caused excruciating pain, thanks to the hypersensitivity that little sliver of spinal cord gave me. Life felt like a cruel joke. It was as if the small part of my spinal cord still intact was programmed to only carry signals of pain up from my legs while completely ignoring my brain’s commands telling my legs to move.
One afternoon, after pushing myself through my workouts, I went back to my room, frustrated and angry. For the first time since I started my rehab, I got very honest with myself. Tears welled up in my eyes, but I fought them back. Then my dad came into my room. One look at him and I could no longer hold back the emotions building inside me. “I’m trying as hard as I can, but nothing is happening,” I said. Dad looked at me as only a parent can, and I got the sense he already knew what I could not admit to myself: I was never going to walk again. I finally realised that no matter how hard you try, paraplegia is not something you beat. Dad looked at me and I cried big, heartfelt tears. Dad was misty eyed too, although he held it together. I gave him a hug and just wept.
Finally Dad said, “Look how far you’ve come,” referring to my surviving the accident and even having the possibility of something approaching a normal life, albeit in a wheelchair. “Now,” he added, “how far can you go?”
Something about my father’s words resonated deep inside me. For more than two years all I wanted to do was turn back the clock. Every day I looked back at what I had
once been and I told myself I had to find a way to get back there. Failure was not an option. Sitting in my room with my dad, I finally admitted to myself the truth I could not outrun. A truck had hit me, breaking my back in three places. My spine had been partially severed and I was now a paraplegic. For two years I clung to the “incomplete” in my diagnosis, as if I could push myself from incomplete paraplegic to fully healed. I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried.
When I finally accepted the reality of my situation, I felt as if the weight of my old life was lifted from my shoulders. For the first time since I pedalled out onto the M4, I could honestly, expectantly ask what the future may hold. I could never look ahead as long as I clung to the past. Once I freed myself of the past, the future looked bright and promising. Since I was a little boy I had dreamed of being a professional athlete. I was still young, and honestly, with the exception of my legs, I was probably in the best shape of my life. How far can I go? I wondered. If I stop looking down on myself in my chair, what might I be able to accomplish?
Even before this conversation with my father, I had started to explore other outlets for my athletic and competitive drive. Johnno and I bought a two-man kayak together. The first couple of times we tried using it we ended up flipped upside down in the water. Once we learned how to sit in it without toppling it over, we started paddling the Nepean River together. One afternoon the two of us set out on the river after Johnno got off work. We planned on doing a long paddle, pushing ourselves to see how far we could go. However, the sun went down earlier than we expected, and we missed our turnaround mark in the river. I thought we had gone too far when I asked Johnno if he thought we ought to turn back. “No, I think it is just around the next bend,” he said. The next bend turned into another and another and another until the two of us were lost on the river in the dark. By the time we finally found our way back to where we’d parked the car, we’d paddled more than thirty kilometres. That episode told me something, besides reminding me that when in doubt on the river, turn around. Paddling thirty kilometres in the dark told me not being able to use my legs had not changed me. I could still go farther and faster.
Johnno and I kept training together and paddling together. In 1990 we entered the Hawkesbury Classic two-person kayak race, better known as Madness by Moonlight. Covering one hundred and eleven kilometres from Windsor to Brooklyn by river, the race started at 5:00 p.m. Johnno and I crossed the finish line at a little after five the next morning. We placed twelfth out of one hundred. I was disappointed with our finish (I had my sights set on gold, as I always do, no matter what I am doing), but we did well enough to keep my athletic dreams alive. A couple of years later we won the New South Wales two-man kayak state championships. I will never forget the looks on the faces of some of our competitors when I got out of the kayak and climbed into my wheelchair.
Success in the kayak reassured me that I was on the right track. Then I came across something that opened up a whole new world to me. Although I loved running, I also loved the sense of speed and freedom that came from riding my bike. Since you can’t ride a bike without legs, that love was no longer available to me—that is, until the day in early 1994 when I came across a handcycle that had been imported from the United States. A handcycle is a three-wheeled bike with a seat that sits low and a pair of hand pedals that sit at chest level. The pedals move in unison with one another, unlike a standard bike, where the pedals are offset 180 degrees. Compared to handcycles today, this model was a beast of a machine, weighing in at more than sixteen kilograms, but to me, it meant freedom. I even dubbed it the Freedom Rider. As soon as I climbed on it, a lightbulb went off. I knew what I had to do next. I went to Johnno and said to him, “I need to finish what I started. I’m going to do the Nepean Triathlon.”
“Okay, mate, let’s give it a go,” Johnno said. Unlike me, he’d never done a triathlon, but such a trivial detail never stopped Johnno.
I knew I could handle the one-kilometre swim portion of the race. I had long since graduated from swimming laps in the hydrotherapy pool to swimming distances in the local Penrith Lakes. The lakes had originally been made out of old quarries. After it was announced that Sydney was to host the 2000 Olympics, the lakes were expanded and transformed into the world-class Sydney International Regatta Centre. The lakes were my favourite place to swim, and they were close to my house.
I also felt confident I could handle the 12K “run”. I did not have a racing chair, nor had it ever entered my mind to get one. All I had was my regular day chair, but I knew it was enough. Four years after I made peace with my chair, wheeling twelve kilometres felt as intimidating as running that distance had before my accident—that is, not at all.
The handcycle, however, was something new. I got the hang of it easily enough. Cranking the two pedals with my arms in a “push-pull” motion works a different muscle set than the downward motion on the push rims of the wheels of my chair, although both tax my arms and upper body. If I hoped to pedal forty kilometres, I needed to do some serious road training. And there was only one place I knew that had the long, straight stretches of road I needed: the M4.
I have to tell you, the first time Johnno and I cycled out onto the M4, my heart was beating in my ears. This wasn’t my first time on the M4. Because it is the primary highway between my then home in Penrith and the city, I drove up and down it at least once a week for six years before Johnno and I rode our bikes down it. Every trip I had to pass the place where the truck hit me. However, there is a huge difference between motoring past that spot in the safety of an automobile and being back out on the bitumen on a bike, especially a handcycle.
A funny thing happened on my first training ride down the M4. Johnno and I came upon the exact spot where the accident occurred, but I didn’t stop and look around. Instead I kept going. I’m still here. I didn’t die. I’m moving on, I told myself as I rode past. Part of my life was frozen in that small stretch of asphalt, but with every crank of the pedals I felt the past lose a little more of its hold on me. Yes, the accident was a turning point in my life, but my life did not end there in any way, shape or form. I changed, certainly, but now it was up to me to decide what I would do with that change. Riding down the M4, training for the very event for which I was training on the day the truck hit me, was my way of saying I had decided to go forward.
My bold confidence started to give way as the day of the actual Nepean Triathlon approached. I felt certain I could finish the race. I never doubted that for a moment. However, my mind flashed back to the day I climbed out of the kayak after winning the New South Wales championships and saw the looks on the other competitors’ faces. I did not want to go through that again. I remained very self-conscious of the sideways glances and double takes my wheeling up to the start line would elicit. So I came up with a plan. I went to Johnno and asked him to go with me to the course the day before the race when no one else was around. “You can help me in and out of the water and up onto my handcycle, and we will do the course together without me drawing attention to myself with my chair,” I said to him. I thought it the perfect solution.
Johnno gave me one of his looks. “What are you talking about?” he said. “You’re doing the race with me and everyone else, and that’s all there is to it.”
“But . . .” I said.
“But what?” Johnno replied. I knew the conversation was over.
The day of the race, my worst fears were confirmed. People stared. Cameras flashed. I was a bit of a sideshow. Johnno carried me into the water, which elicited more stares and funny looks. But once the starter blew his whistle and I started the swim, all of the pre-race awkwardness just sort of evaporated away. In the water I was just another head topped with a green swim cap in a churning sea of green swim caps. At the end of the swim leg, Johnno had to carry me out of the water and help position me onto my handcycle. As soon as he did, I was off and on my own. The rest of the race is a blur, except for the ambulance that trailed me throughout the “run”. Mu
ltiple times the driver called out, “Are you okay? Do you need help?”
“I’m fine, mate. Thanks,” I called back. I struggled a bit with the steepest hill, but once I made it over it, I knew I was going to finish.
The crowd had thinned by the time I crossed the finish line, which was a bit of a relief to me. I still felt self-conscious about my condition. The fewer eyes on me, the better. When I did cross the finish line, a wave of emotion swept over me, a feeling that I had just stepped into a beginning rather than across an end. Not only had I closed the circle going back to the 1988 Nepean, but a new door had opened to me. I no longer felt the need to go back. Instead, I was anxious to go out and see what else I could do. It was 1994 and I could still hear my father’s words ringing in my ears. “How far can you go?” he asked. I couldn’t wait to find out.
4
More than Able
* * *
When I did my first two triathlons in 1986 and 1987, I did not foresee any long-term role for triathlons in my life. I was a football player. Besides giving me a new arena to compete against my friend Colin, the sport basically served as nothing more than cross-training to make me stronger and faster for the football field. Then came my trip down the M4 that took away my dreams of playing football for a living. However, the competitive drive in me was still as strong as ever, as were my dreams of competing on the biggest stages available. I couldn’t move up to play first grade rugby league but, I wondered after becoming the first wheelie to complete the Nepean Triathlon, would it be possible for me to complete a longer triathlon? I had to find out.