How Far Can You Go

by John Maclean

  Rob looked at me, silent. His eyes misted. He swallowed hard. I could tell he didn’t know what to say.

  “I don’t mean I expect you to get me up and walking again,” I said. “I believe I will walk again. How it will happen is anyone’s guess, but I know it will. I would like for you to help me do some things that might put me in a better position to act when the opportunity presents itself.”

  “I can do that,” Rob said with an uncertain tone in his voice. “Let’s get you standing up and see what we’ve got.” I had always been able to stand for short bursts of time. To stand for any time at all, I had to lean up against something. Rob stood me up and went to work on my posture. “Imagine you have a string pulling you up straight through the top of your head,” he told me. Again, I didn’t expect him to have some new treatment that might lead me to take a step. I’d been through all sorts of PT over the previous twenty-five years. I knew what to expect. This wasn’t about taking my first steps but about being ready for when that time came.

  Throughout the last few months of 2012 I went deeper and deeper into my meditation. Amanda’s company sold. By Christmas we knew her work with them would soon end. Choosing to see this as an opportunity rather than a problem, we made plans to see more of the world as a family. With our house now up for sale, we decided to spend three months in Hawaii during 2013. Both of us love the islands, and we couldn’t think of a better place to go and regroup as we tried to figure out where life might take us next. We went to Oahu for a couple of weeks before the end of the year to find a rental house. While we were there I met more people who confirmed I was on the right track in my meditation efforts with an eye towards regaining use of my legs.

  Athletically, this was a very dry season for me. For the first time since before I completed my first triathlon as a wheelie, I didn’t know what to do next. The London Games had come and gone. Kathryn and her new partner did not gain a medal, but that did not make me want to go back into that sport and give it another go for Rio in 2016. I was never overly passionate about rowing. I could do it, and I thought I was relatively good at it, but I did not miss it.

  In early January 2013, I received a phone call from a friend with the Paralympics. “Great news, John,” he said. “Paddling has been added for Rio, both kayak and Va’a.” Va’a, or V-1, is a one-person outrigger canoe very similar to those I paddled in the Molokai challenges I completed.

  “That is great news. What do I need to do if I want to explore this further?” I replied. I love paddling, a sport very different from rowing. I’ve loved it since Johnno and I bought a kayak together and paddled it up and down the Nepean River in 1990. This was my first love, at least for sports on the water.

  “Go over to the lakes at Penrith. We’ll get you going there.”

  I borrowed a boat and paddle and headed over to the lakes the following week. Two weeks later I had an opportunity to race at the state championships. I had entered just to set a benchmark for myself, to see where I stood with zero training. The results were encouraging. My time in the final was just over a second slower than the current Australian champion. I’d found my next big thing.

  Immediately, I set my sights on Rio. Our dream for London where I would win the gold, hoist Jack onto my lap and snap a photograph that would hang on his wall was simply pushed back four years to Rio 2016. My days of deep meditation became days of training and paddling down at the lakes. I spent three or four days a week there, and my times showed it. Comparing them to the best times in the world, I was right there. With three and a half years to prepare for the Rio games, I believed my dream of a gold medal was very, very attainable. I started looking about for the best boat and equipment. At this point I was still using borrowed equipment at the rowing centre at the lakes. I had my new goal. All of my focus was now on paddling and Rio.

  However, as I trained I ran into an old problem. I had hurt my left shoulder in the 1995 Hawaiian Ironman, and it had never been quite the same since. Massages and physical therapy had been part of my training routine ever since. Once I started paddling again I had to go see Rob about once a week for him to ease my shoulder pain. Amanda had learned how to help the pain as well, which she had to do in between my visits with Rob. My shoulder problem was more than an annoyance. The shoulder seemed to be getting worse, not better. Both Amanda and I feared that I might need surgery on it in the not-too-distant future. I don’t have to say how inconvenient that would be for me as a wheelie, or for us as a family. You can’t push yourself in a chair with one arm, not without going around and around in circles.

  The growing pain in my shoulder added to the regular pain I had lived with since the day of my accident. Because I am an incomplete paraplegic, my accident left me hypersensitive to pain. Even though I have not mentioned this fact since the first chapter, the hypersensitivity never went away. My bum hurt if I sat too long (i.e., in a wheelchair). Most nights I woke up with pain in my right foot. Because I lack hip abductor muscles, I could pull my knee right up to my chest and hold my foot tucked just under my ribs. Many nights that is how I would drift off to sleep, holding my foot tucked into my body, massaging it over and over, trying to quell the pain. I also lived with stiffness in my back. All of it I simply learned to live with. I think for years I overcame my day-to-day discomfort with the pain we thrive on as athletes. I was burning up my arms and upper body so much doing Ironman and swimming, day-to-day pain just seemed part of the journey. However, the growing problems with my shoulder had me and my wife concerned.

  Amanda, Jack and I took off for a getaway up in Queensland. The three of us were having a great break away as a family, and catching up with friends we don’t see often. One of those friends was Pete Jacobs. Pete is one of the premier triathletes in the world and an ambassador for the John Maclean Foundation. He won the Hawaiian Ironman world championship in Kona in 2012 after finishing second there in 2011. I knew Pete had been battling a couple of injuries, but when I saw him, he appeared to be pain-free.

  “I found an interesting new therapist,” Pete explained to me, “a guy up north named Ken Ware. Let me tell you, mate, the guy is amazing. I went in to see him limping and came out sprinting. It’s pretty unconventional. I’ve definitely never done anything like it, but I bet he could help with your shoulder.”

  Amanda and I looked at each other. “Sounds like it is worth a try,” Amanda said. “Why don’t you give him a call?”

  11

  Three Small Steps

  * * *

  My forearms started shaking. The tremor spread up my arms and across my shoulders. My arms rocked back and forth in perfect rhythm with one another. I struggled to hold on to the handles of the chest-press machine. As the tremor grew in intensity, my hands whipped the handles back and forth. The main pulley that connected the handles to the weights banged against the metal frame of the machine. In spite of the loud clanging, I kept my eyes closed, cleared my mind, and allowed my body to accept the current that was flowing through it.

  The spasm spread down my shoulders, causing my body to wobble from side to side as if an earthquake was rolling beneath me. I felt Ken Ware’s light touch on my back, keeping me in place. “Let it evolve,” he said. “Don’t try to resist it.” The shaking grew in intensity. Before I knew what was happening my legs began to jump and jerk in and out as I straddled the chest-press machine. The movement in my legs really caught me by surprise. As the tremor evolved, both the left and right leg mirrored one another, moving in and out, in and out in unison as the rest of my body rocked about like I’d been jolted with electricity. The machine clanged. My hands could barely hold on to the handles, much less keep the little bit of weight on the machine in place. “That’s good. That’s good,” Ken repeated.

  My eyes closed, my entire body shaking, the tremor kept going and going. I’d never experienced anything like it, and I’d spent most of my adult life on weight machines in the gym. “Keep your eyes closed. I need you to try to stand outside yourself and just observe what is
happening,” Ken Ware said. “Don’t react to it, or try and stop it. Just let it go.”

  I nodded my head, although I’m not sure if Ken could tell that’s what I was trying to do. My head rocked with the tremor that had overtaken my body. I held my grip on the chest-press handles and tried to continue moving them slowly, methodically forward and back just as Ken had instructed me. By this point, slow and methodical looked more like a frog in a sock.

  “Good. Good,” Ken said with a soft, reassuring tone. “Be the observer. Let it go and don’t attach yourself to the process of what’s happening right now.”

  The velocity of the tremor increased. My body felt like it could slip off the machine at any moment. I strained to keep my eyes closed, to let the tremor sweep over me without reacting to it. My months of meditation paid off as I took control over my breathing and turned off the torrent of random thoughts running through my mind. Take it in. Observe. Listen to what your body is telling you, I told myself. I felt like an earthquake fault had opened up inside me.

  Then, after what seemed like a very long time but was in truth just a few moments, the tremor began to subside. My legs slowed to a stop. My shoulders stopped shaking. Finally, my arms and hands grew still. I lowered the weight and stopped.

  “Okay, you can open your eyes,” Ken said to me.

  “Wow! What was that?” I asked.

  Ken smiled. “Your nervous system is starting to recalibrate itself, turning loose all the stored emotion you’ve packed in over the past forty-seven years. All that emotion acts like an internal brake inside you. It’s what holds you back and inhibits you from letting your body do what it is capable of doing.”

  “And I thought I was here to have you take a look at my sore shoulder,” I said with a laugh.

  “Everything is connected, John. Your mind and body and emotions, your past, present and future—they’re all intertwined. We’re focusing on your whole system, not a specific injury. We’re fixing the connections and essentially rebooting your system by setting free the stored-up, internal chaos.”

  “Why didn’t a tremor come about on the first couple of machines you put me on?” I asked. When the tremor began, Ken and I had been at it for over an hour, moving slowly from one weight machine to another with a series of exercises, all of which used low resistance and very slow repetitions.

  “I would say, John, the truly remarkable thing is that the tremors began on this first day after only an hour. That’s quite unusual. Many times it takes longer for someone to silence the noise in their brains and let the natural chaotic rhythms of their nervous system take over,” Ken replied.

  “I’ve spent a lot of time in meditation,” I replied.

  “It shows,” he said.

  Even though Ken and I had known each other for all of twenty-four hours, I had already begun to build a level of trust with him. We hit it off from the moment he picked me up at the airport when I flew up from Sydney to his centre in Emerald, Queensland. For the past twenty-five years Ken had been practising his theory, tapping into the nervous system, but he was also a body builder and a runner. That created some common ground between us. Through the years, he’d done a great deal of research into the ways in which the laws of physics and biology interact within the human body, all of which builds on chaos theory. Ken works with some impressive people in the scientific community all around the world, and his work has been published in prestigious science journals. On top of that, I kept going back to what my friend Pete had said—that he came to Ken limping and left sprinting. Science is all well and good, but results really grab my attention.

  “Take a seat on the lat pull-down machine,” Ken said.

  I shifted over from the chest-press machine into my wheelchair and wheeled across Ken’s gym to the lat pull-down. As a wheelchair athlete, I spent a lot of time over the years building my upper-body muscles, so this was familiar territory. Ken set the weight at four and a half kilograms, the lowest setting on the machine. Obviously, this was not to be a strength-building exercise.

  “Close your eyes, John. Switch off the visual cortex so that the two hemispheres of your brain can communicate with one another. I also want you to be fully present with me. Turn off the internal dialogue and stop chasing thousands of random thoughts running about your head. Now, I want you to pull out with your arms very slowly and focus on the resistance you feel.”

  I slowly pulled on the handles. “Equal and even, John. Make sure the force is equal and even,” Ken said. “Imagine there’s a line cutting right down the middle of your body. Let go and let the two sides communicate.”

  I did my best to do just that. As I pulled against the resistance on my arms, my eyes closed, I found my anxiety level rising. The weight on the machine was very small, and I’d done literally thousands, if not tens of thousands, of reps on machines just like this, but there was something about pulling this low weight so slowly, with my eyes closed, that made the weight seem suddenly heavy and caused my anxiety to grow.

  “Turn off the internal dialogue and let go,” Ken said, as if he had a camera inside my mind. “The anxiety you feel is normal. The resistance from the weights brings it up to the surface.”

  Sitting there, eyes closed, pulling slowly against such light resistance that suddenly felt very, very heavy, my mind raced. I went back to my months of meditation to gain control, which proved far from easy in spite of my success on the previous machine. I felt old emotions flooding up to the surface.

  It was as though Ken could read my mind. “Let go of the accident. Let go of the truck. Let go of whoever first told you that you would never walk again.”

  A thought flashed through my mind. Who told me I would never walk again? Names and faces flashed through my mind. The doctors never said it. The therapists didn’t. Who did? Then I remembered. It was me. No one else had to say it because they knew it to be true. They waited for me to admit it to myself.

  It is difficult to describe the sensation I felt as my arms pulled against the four and a half kilograms of resistance, my eyes closed. The closed eyes are the key. I’ve spent most of my life in gyms. I feel at home there. But pulling against the weight, not doing reps but just feeling the resistance with my eyes closed, trying to keep my mind neutral, I felt very, very vulnerable. And when you feel vulnerable, you want to snap back and try to take control of the situation to make yourself safe. Ken wanted me to do just the opposite. He wanted me to feel the vulnerability and embrace it.

  Be present, I reminded myself. Not in the past. Not in the future. Be here. Now. On this machine. Feel the weight. Embrace this moment. The tremors quickly followed, once again starting in my arms. The weights bounced. The machine clanged. The tremor evolved throughout my body. Now that I knew what to expect, I found it easier to let it roll. The intensity increased. My legs shook in front of me, this time almost violently. I arched back, eyes closed, breathing slowly. As I relaxed, the intensity increased beyond anything I experienced before. I didn’t expect it. “That’s how it works,” Ken said. “The more relaxed you are and the slower you move the weight, the more chaotic the tremor becomes.”

  “I guess that means it’s working,” I said after the tremor had passed.

  Ken laughed. “That’s right. As you connect with the resistance, the entire nervous system gets involved. We aren’t just working one part of your body. The lat pull-down machine wasn’t so much working your muscles as it was tapping into your entire nervous system to release the tension you have built up in it, sort of like releasing a wound-up rubber band.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. “What now?”

  “That’s it for today. We’ll do more on the same machines tomorrow, then build from there on the third and fourth days.”

  Altogether the first session in his gym lasted a little over two and a half hours. By the end of our session the pain in my shoulder and my right leg and bum had greatly diminished. Unfortunately, the reduced pain did not result in better sleep. That night I tossed and turned
in bed. At times my body shook like small aftershocks from the tremors that afternoon. When I did manage to get to sleep, I found myself barraged by the most bizarre dreams. It was one of the worst nights of sleep of my life.

  The next morning Ken had a sly smile on his face as he asked, “How did you sleep?” His tone told me he already knew the answer.

  “Awful,” I said. “But something tells me you already knew that.”

  Ken laughed. “That’s part of the recalibration process. It is like your nervous system is doing a data dump. You should get back to normal sleep in a day or two.”

  That day we went through the same series of exercises. The tremors came quicker and stronger. At the end of the session Ken sat down on a bench across from me. “So how do you feel?” he asked.

  “Good,” I replied. “Really good.”

  “And the shoulder?”

  “Better.” I moved my right arm about. “Better than it has in a long time,” I said, nodding and smiling.

  “Good. Good,” Ken said. Then he paused for a moment before saying, “You came here for your shoulder, but I think there’s more to it than that. What do you really want to do, John?”

  “I want to walk and I want to run,” I replied, without having to give the question a thought. Even though I had turned my attention to paddling and getting ready for a gold-medal run in Rio, I still wanted to walk as much as I did when I came home from the health retreat several months earlier. Who am I kidding? Even if I had not been to the retreat and hadn’t had my session with Sonja, and even if I had not spent months doing deep meditation where I saw myself walking and running again, I would have given Ken the same answer. After twenty-five years in a wheelchair, my dream of walking again had never died.