by John Maclean
After Amanda returned home, Ken surprised me with a new shock to my system, something I had not done since I was a child. “I want you to climb up on the trampoline,” he told me.
Ken didn’t expect me to climb on, stand up and start jumping about, not on the first day, at least. He started me off with push-ups. Most of you have probably done conventional push-ups, as have I, but attempting them on the constantly moving surface of a trampoline was something else entirely. I struggled to do a dozen that first time on the trampoline. However, by the afternoon I was doing sets of twenty at a time.
After the push-ups, Ken had me get up on my knees, then up onto my feet. Getting onto my feet was hard enough. Remaining upright was nearly impossible. Just as he had done on the beach, Ken had me stand with my eyes closed. Over and over I lost my balance and tumbled onto my side. Each time I got back up. “Relax, John. Get comfortable up there. Let go of whatever is going on internally.” Eventually I got to the point where I could stand. Of course, that was only the beginning. By the end of my time on the Gold Coast with Ken, he had me bouncing up on the trampoline, falling back on my bum, and bouncing back up onto my feet. I felt like a little kid. This wasn’t therapy. This was fun!
I bought a trampoline when I got home. It sits in our backyard today, and Jack and I spend time playing and bouncing together. I never thought anything could compare to walking down the beach with my wife, but this is a very close second. For twenty-five years I never thought I would get out of my wheelchair. Now I am bouncing on a trampoline with my son. It’s like winning a gold medal every day.
14
Two Steps Back in Paradise
* * *
A few weeks after my stroll along the beach with Amanda, Ken came back to Sydney for one last session before Amanda, Jack and I left for a dream three-month stay in a beach house in Lanikai, Hawaii. I wanted to spend as much time with Ken as I could before the trip so that I might squeeze as much out of myself as possible. Three months is a long time to go between sessions, but given the progress we’d made thus far, I felt confident I could continue building on my own. Ken likes to keep things shaken up to keep my system from growing too accustomed to any one set of exercises, and this trip was definitely no exception. “We’re going to the shops,” he announced.
Walking on a beach is one thing. Walking inside Penrith Plaza in front of many curious eyes is another. However, by this time I had grown confident enough in my walking that I was ready for more people to have a look. “I’m game,” I told Ken. “What do you have in mind?”
What he had in mind was the escalators. I hadn’t stepped on a set of escalators since before my accident. I also was a bit hesitant because on escalators, the ground moves underneath you. Once you are on the stair portion, all you have to do is stand. However, at the top and bottom are the flat pieces where you must step on or off quickly with both feet. In spite of my reservations, I told Ken I was up for anything. I even made a phone call before we left to give myself a little extra motivation to make it up the escalators.
Our friend Paul had been present with his camera at most of my sessions with Ken to document the process. When we arrived at the Plaza with Paul in tow, we were stopped by security. “No filming allowed,” we were told. I explained what we had in mind and why the camera was there, but my explanation fell on deaf ears. Paul had to turn off the camera. Ken and I walked across the mall to the escalators in the centre. My gait is a little different from most people’s. I guess you could describe it as a bit of a limp. If anyone noticed as we walked through the mall, they didn’t care enough to stop and stare. We walked along just like any other two shoppers.
At the base of the escalators, Ken gave me a bit of a pep talk. “Stand up straight, step forward, and have a ride of it,” he said. “There’s really nothing to it.”
I looked down at the flat moving belt at the base of the escalators. It looked like something to me. I looked up at the top and knew there was only one way up there to the appointment I had made. “Here goes,” I said. I stepped out with my right foot and then quickly brought my left beside it. I looked about as the stairs carried me up, and enjoyed the view. I felt like a little boy riding up for the first time.
As I neared the end of my ride I turned toward the front and focused all my attention on my dismount. The top stair flattened out. The conveyor belt moved me forward. I raised my right foot and then dropped it down on the solid ground in front of me. My left foot followed. I took another quick couple of steps from the momentum I had from the escalators themselves. Ken looked up at me from below. “Nice ride, mate. I knew you could do it.”
I gave him a wave and a smile, then turned and walked towards the coffee shop just up the way. Up ahead I saw that my appointment was already there, waiting for me, although he hadn’t yet seen me. I stepped through the door of the coffee shop. Johnno looked up. “Hello, mate,” I said with a broad grin. The look on his face is one I will always remember. Tears filled his eyes. He jumped up and came over to me. I looked him in the eye, face to face, having walked up to meet him for the first time in twenty-five years. “It’s something, isn’t it?” I said.
Johnno grabbed me and gave me a hug. We both had tears in our eyes now.
Every day I grew more comfortable with life on my feet, so much so that when it came time to leave for Hawaii, Amanda and I decided to leave my crutches behind, instead opting to take the walking poles. Although I gave up trying to walk any distance on the crutches back in 1990, I still used them for getting in and out of the car and on airplanes to move about. However, since I started working with Ken, I had, for all intents and purposes, laid my crutches aside completely. I saw no reason to drag them to Hawaii with us, not even as an emergency backup in case I had a setback. I’ve never been one to worry about setbacks. The cursed Canadian crutches remained in Australia while Amanda, Jack and I flew off for our three-month stay in Lanikai. I planned on getting rid of them once and for all after we came home.
Leaving the crutches behind felt like crossing over another barrier, as though I had left a piece of the damage of the accident behind. I could not wait to get to Hawaii and see how much farther I could go during our three-month holiday in paradise. I didn’t have to wait until we arrived to find out. A couple of hours into the flight I decided to stretch my legs and go to the bathroom. A bit later I came back to Amanda and Jack. I was beaming like I’d just qualified for Rio. “I’ve just been to the bathroom for the first time on a plane not using crutches,” I announced. This may seem like something small to you, but it was a huge moment for me. I finally felt free. I think I sort of floated above my seat the rest of the flight, I was so happy. With such a great moment of victory on the flight, I could not wait to see what the next three months held in store for us.
The first couple of days in Hawaii were exactly as I had hoped they would be. On the third day, Amanda and I went out in our backyard to throw a football around while Jack was off to his first day of preschool on the island. Ken had actually recommended this exercise to us as a way of developing my balance. He also wanted me to do this barefoot to toughen up my feet and engage sensory stimulation. I didn’t much care for the barefoot part, but the man had gotten me up and walking. I wasn’t going to argue with his methods now.
The grass in the yard was sea grass and more coarse than ours back home in Sydney. The scene, however, was amazing. Our grass ran down to a strip of sand. Beyond the sand lay the Pacific Ocean. I could think of no better place to toss around a football.
Rather than pass the football straight to me every time, Amanda passed it just to my right or my left. The idea was that this forced me to move laterally, something I had trouble doing. “Have a go at this,” she’d say as she heaved it to me. For a girl, she has a pretty good arm. I had to dive for a few, but not many. We laughed and talked and had a great time throwing the ball around the yard. I never imagined I’d get to do such a thing. The only hard part was the grass and my bare feet. After all the years
of disuse, the bottoms of my feet were soft like a baby’s, completely free of calluses. They were ill prepared for a day of moving about on coarse grass.
I paid the price the next day.
I woke up and immediately could sense discomfort in my right foot. The sensation was very different from what I had experienced for so many years. I lifted my leg up to have a look to see if I could figure out what was going on. There, on the bottom of my big toe, was an enormous blister. I am not exaggerating when I say it was the size of a fifty-cent piece. Another set of smaller blisters covered part of my heel. “Amanda, come have a look at this,” I said.
She took one look and said, “Oh, that’s not good.”
I did not realise at the time how big a setback these blisters truly were. I could not put weight on my right foot, not because of my spinal cord injury, but because the blister agitated my hypersensitivity and sent pain messages shooting up my leg. Living on the beach didn’t help. We tried protecting the blister with a large-size bandage, but that didn’t work. Sand crept in under the bandage when I went swimming. I tried a silicone sock over just the toe. I had the same problem. Looking back, I suppose the toe may have healed faster if I had been content to sit in the house in front of the television with my foot propped up. But we were in Hawaii, in a house right on the beach. There was no way I was going to waste my time on a couch waiting for a blister to go away.
The blister on my toe kept me from walking, so I went back to using the wheelchair inside the house. Amanda went to the local pharmacy and purchased a pair of traditional crutches for me to use to get myself in and out of the water and over the sand. I did not let my inability to stretch the limits of my walking get me down. We had two spare bedrooms in our house, and we had friends and family coming in and out for the whole three months.
When I wasn’t entertaining friends, I was on the water. A good friend Randy lent me two outriggers, a two-man and a single. I trained every day in the single. I struck up a friendship with a local who happened to know the under-18 paddling world champion. He agreed to help me with my technique. Other paddlers were all around me. Lanikai is basically a paddler’s paradise. I spent hours on the water, but the time flew by. Time wasn’t the only thing flying. My brother-in-law had measured and marked up a two-hundred-metre course in the inlet for me. We spent hours doing time trials. During one training run on the course, I matched the world record time for my event. With more than two years of training still to go, it felt like I was on the right track to seriously consider Rio.
I didn’t confine my paddling to the course, though. Just off Lanikai Beach, and right out my back door, are two small islands known as the Mokes. Waves come up between the islands and the shore and create great surf. I paddled out in the middle of them and caught some waves. Basically, I was surfing in an outrigger canoe.
One afternoon the wind changed while I was out paddling, and the waves that came rolling in were the best yet. I rode wave after wave, staying out on the water much later than usual. I looked around at the waves and thought about calling it a day. Instead, I said those three little words that always get you into trouble: “Just one more.” I watched the waves coming toward me. A big one was coming my way, so I turned and paddled hard to get on top of it. As soon as I got high up on it, I knew I was in trouble. The wave kept building and building until it suddenly threw me down in front of it and crashed down on top of me. It pushed me under the water. Unfortunately, I had attached the Velcro ankle strap fixed to the outrigger. The boat was now filled with water and going down fast, taking me with it. Oh, this is not good, I said to myself. All of my meditation training kicked in. Instead of panicking I stayed as calm as one could possibly stay while going under the water, strapped to an outrigger canoe. Finally, the force of the water stopped pulling the boat under, and I managed to reach down and rip the Velcro ankle strap off. At last I was free from the outrigger, but I was still far under the water. I swam toward the light above me with all I had. At last my head bobbed above the water. I filled my lungs with oxygen. No breath of air ever tasted so good.
Once I was on top of the water, I was able to survey my situation. My outrigger was coming to the surface as well, albeit in four pieces. I swam over and retrieved my paddle, since it was also borrowed. I stuffed it down the back of my pants. I looked around. The closest Moke island looked to be about a kilometre away, not that it would do me much good beyond getting out of the water. The Mokes are nothing but rock with a small strip of sand surrounding them. I could see my house off in the other direction. Getting there meant a four-kilometre swim. Okay, so what am I going to do now? I said to myself. I knew the answer. I had to go for a swim. I couldn’t stay where I was.
I was about to swim towards home when I spotted a guy in a fishing boat off the rocks on the island farthest from me. He had a runabout pulled up on the sand. I started waving my paddle, and fortunately he saw me. He started pulling his line in and signalled that he would head my way. He came over in the small aluminum runabout. After he pulled me out of the water I asked, “Can you help me gather the pieces to my boat? It doesn’t belong to me. I borrowed it from a friend.”
“Sure,” the fisherman said. On the ride towards my house he told me how he’d been stranded out in the same area once and rescued. “As soon as I saw you I knew I had to help,” he said. I thanked him, but I also wondered if he hadn’t been helped if he would have just let me swim the four kilometres on my own.
Eventually we reached the shore by my house. I’d left my wheelchair sitting on the edge of the grass just above the beach. “Whose wheelchair is that?” he asked.
“Mine,” I replied.
“No way, man! You’re out surfing the waves in the Mokes and you’re in a wheelchair? That’s crazy, dude!”
I guess he was probably right. It was a little crazy, but it sure was fun. My mother-in-law, Karen, was visiting and came down to the beach as the fisherman was dragging the pieces of my outrigger onto the sand. She had been checking her watch, knowing I was overdue to be back. She was relieved that I had managed to get a lift back but was more than a little bit shocked at seeing the boat in four pieces.
Once we returned home from Hawaii, my foot finally started to heal properly. I started working on walking again, but I also continued focusing heavily upon paddling. I raced the Australian champion a second time. He’d beaten me by a second before I left for Hawaii. In the rematch I beat him by three full seconds. My goal was clear.
15
“Which Do You Want More?”
* * *
For twenty-five years my wheelchair was an inseparable part of who I was. While I refused to accept the label disabled, if someone asked who I was and what I did, I’d reply, “I am John Maclean, Paralympian,” or “John Maclean, wheelchair athlete.” I realise for some, those labels are synonymous with what is termed disabled, but they never were for me. Disabled means less than, and I proved throughout my sporting life that I was in no way less than anyone. And I’ve come to realise the same holds true even if I had never competed in any sport. No wheelie is less than anyone else, nor is any person who lives with what some call disabilities. Every person alive faces daily challenges we must overcome to succeed. Some are simply more visible than others. My chair was my physical reminder to everyone of the challenges I faced, but rather than hide it I learned to embrace it.
In the two years immediately following my accident, I never thought I could possibly grow so comfortable with my chair. I hated it in the beginning. 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. But once I came to peace with the fact that I was never going to get my old life back, I quickly discovered my chair set me free to race into my new life. Eventually it simply became a part of me, so much so that if a fire alarm goes off in the middle of the night, my natural reaction is to bounce into my chair and wheel out the door (after grabbing my wife and son
first, of course).
Reaching this level of acceptance was a good and healthy thing for me. No one can ever go forward if they cling to the past. I had long since released my football-playing, I-can-outrun-everyone-on-the-field self. Once I did I went farther, faster, than I ever dreamed possible. I saw no reason this had to stop. I still had a gold medal to win, with new challenges and new possibilities waiting for me beyond that.
I was quite secure in who I was and how I saw myself until I wheeled into Ken’s gym a short time after returning from Hawaii. Our three months in Lanikai had been everything we had imagined it might be, but real life was waiting for us when we returned. Our house in Penrith had sold. Amanda and I didn’t have much time to find a new place to live closer to the city, however. Amanda’s father had battled health issues for some time, and he took a turn for the worse not long after we returned to Australia. Amanda wanted to spend time with her father in New Zealand, and when he passed away in early December she remained to be with family while I looked after Jack, before heading over for the funeral and Christmas.
During one of her brief stays back in Australia I made a quick trip to see Ken. The wounds on my feet had finally healed, and I was anxious once again to move ahead with my walking. I wheeled in, and Ken and I started talking about my time in Hawaii. “It was wonderful,” I told him. “I fell in with a group of paddlers over there who helped me immensely with my techniques.” I went on to tell him the biggest development of all: that I had matched the world record time in my event during a training run on our makeshift course. “I could not have done this without you, Ken. My shoulder feels better than it has in years. I think I am only scratching the surface of what I can achieve.”