by John Maclean
Now, before I tell you Ken’s response, please remember that I originally went to him because of my shoulder pain that hindered my paddling. If I had never climbed into an outrigger with the goal of bringing home a gold medal from Rio, I never would have gone to see him once, much less multiple visits of four and five days at a time. While walking had been my goal since my time at the health retreat following the disappointment of missing out on the London games, I had no idea Ken could help me get back on my feet when I first went to see him. I went to him for pain relief, nothing more. Walking was an unexpected, happy discovery.
After I told him about my progress with paddling, Ken asked me, “What do you want more, John? Do you want a gold medal or do you want to walk?”
The answer was obvious. I wanted to walk more than anything else. However, up until this point, I never saw this as an either/or proposition. “Obviously, walk,” I replied. “But why do I have to make a choice?”
“It all goes back to your internal dialogue and what you believe about yourself, how you see yourself.”
“Okay,” I said, a little unsure of where he was going with this. As I wrote earlier, I am quite comfortable with who I am.
“Here’s the question I want you to think about, John. Who are you, really?”
I thought about his question for a moment. “Go on,” I said without answering.
“You came to me to help you achieve your goal of a gold medal. The pain in your shoulder threatened your goal, but now the shoulder is better and now you are able to push yourself and go faster than you could before. You just spent three months paddling in Hawaii. Now your sights are set on winning gold in the 2016 Paralympics, and that goal seems very achievable.”
“Yes. This is all true.”
Ken leaned over and looked me in the eye. “But is that who you are, John? Are you John Maclean, Paralympian? Because, you see, when you define yourself in those terms, you are still defining yourself by who you were six months ago, before you took your first three steps in my gym, before you ran on the beach, and before you walked hand in hand with your lovely wife. Are you still that same person today?”
“Because if that is how I see myself, that is who I will continue to be,” I said.
“Well said,” Ken replied. “Now, if winning a gold medal is what you want most out of life, very good. You are on your way. But I think we’ve only just begun to explore and exploit the parameters of what you can do on your legs. Your wheelchair is the default position for you. It’s easy to go back to default. Very easy. But if you want to reset your default, you must first change what you believe about yourself. That’s the choice you have to make. Which do you want more, to walk or to win a gold medal?”
In a way, this conversation reminded me of the conversation I had with my father on the day I embraced my wheelchair, the day I realised paraplegia is not something you beat. “Look how far you’ve come,” my dad said. “Now, how far can you go?” I had gone further in my chair than even I ever imagined possible. Ironman Hall of Fame. First athlete to swim the English Channel and complete the Hawaiian Ironman. Olympian. Two-time Paralympian. Paralympic silver medalist. In essence, Ken was now telling me the same thing. Look how far you’ve come already in your chair. Now, how far can you go on your legs?
But did this have to be an either/or equation? Why couldn’t I see how far I could go on my legs while also pursuing my dream of winning a gold medal? I wrestled with this question for a while, even after I thought I had answered it. Again, the choice was easy. I wanted to walk and I wanted to run. But I also loved paddling. The camaraderie with my fellow paddlers at home on the Nepean River and in Hawaii with so many friends was not something I wanted to give up. My times with Johnno in our kayak so many years ago were some of the best memories of my life. Gold was certainly my goal, but the sport was more than that for me. I loved it. I enjoyed rowing to a degree, but paddling was completely different. Giving it up was a far more difficult decision than what I imagined during my conversation with Ken.
I returned home to Penrith. We had to be out of the house in a few weeks, which meant we had to find a new house. Because we had so little time, we decided to look at rental properties rather than find a house to buy. One rainy afternoon Amanda and I set out to look at a couple of places our real estate agent had found for us. Jack stayed with a babysitter. We didn’t want to drag him out in such foul weather. I didn’t look forward to it myself. If we hadn’t had our backs against the wall in terms of when we had to be out of our house, I might have tried to push the appointment back a day or two. But since we didn’t have the luxury of time, Amanda and I made the hour-long drive into the city in the rain.
We drove up to the first house the real estate agent had for us to see. The rain grew heavier and heavier. I parked on the street outside the house. Amanda turned to me and said, “See you in there!” She jumped out of the car and raced up to the porch and into the house as quickly as she could to keep from getting soaked, leaving me with the umbrella to make my way at a slightly slower pace. Eventually she came back to the front door to check on me. I was out of the car, but I hadn’t gone up to the house. Instead, she found me standing on the driveway. I looked over at her with a huge grin on my face. Amanda shouted over the rain, “Come on! What are you doing?”
Then it hit her: I was walking in the rain holding an umbrella, something I could never do in a chair. She smiled and laughed when I made it to the house.
“How good is this!” I said, giving her a hug.
We went inside the house for the home tour. All the while I kept thinking to myself, This is the difference between going for gold and walking. The choice isn’t about grand achievements and medals but about my daily quality of life. Which do I want more, a gold medal or to walk? The choice was starting to get easier.
Since Ken’s first visit to Penrith, I had continued toying with Amanda’s stationary bike. I had managed to get one revolution with the pedals, which led to another and another. However, I could not go for long because my right ankle banged into the bike frame. Since I couldn’t keep my foot from turning in on my own, I decided to look for other solutions.
I talked to an engineer friend, John Roach, and asked if he could adapt a pedal that would keep my ankle free of the bike. He built a wedge that my entire foot could rest on. We experimented with several models until we found one that worked reasonably well. I liked it so much I had him do one for the left side as well. Although I could control my left leg a little better than I could my right, concentrating on keeping my left foot in line used up energy I preferred to use pushing the pedals up and down.
With the new pedals in place, I found I could get a good rhythm going on the stationary bike in our garage. One day while riding the bike I started to wonder, What would happen if I put these pedals on a regular bicycle? I decided to find out. We were a little over a week from moving out from Penrith when one evening Paul, a close neighbour, and I transferred the pedals to Amanda’s bicycle. I, obviously, did not have a standard bike of my own. Paul and I managed to attach the pedals, but I did not immediately jump on and go for a ride. I wanted Amanda to be there. The next morning I said, “I’m going to go for a ride on your bike.”
“My real bike?” she said, still in bed.
“Yeah. Paul helped me put the pedals John made for me on it. I’m going to try to take it for a spin.”
“Well, just wait; I need to get Jack sorted. I want to see you ride it, and I’ll get the video camera,” Amanda said.
“Sure, sure,” I said. “I will wait for you.” I put on a pair of cycling pants to protect my bony bum and went outside to wait for Amanda.
But of course, I didn’t wait long. I tried, I really did, but standing in the garage, staring at those pedals hanging off that bicycle, I was a little boy on Christmas morning. That little boy finally could wait no longer. I pushed the bike out into the street in front of the house. I couldn’t just throw my foot over and go. Instead, I had to push the b
ike over next to the kerb. I stood on top of the kerb and placed my right leg over the bike and situated my foot on the pedal. I then attached a strap over the top of my foot to hold it in place. With my right foot strapped in, I started pushing myself along the kerb with my left, trying to build momentum. One of two things was going to happen. Either I would ride off down the street, or I would fall over. If I fell, I planned on jumping back up and trying again until I got the result I wanted.
I gave myself one last big push and set my left foot up onto the pedal and pushed down hard. The handlebars wobbled a bit as I moved away from the kerb into the street. I started cranking the pedals, building up a little speed. I broke out in a huge smile. This really was Christmas morning. “How good is this?” I said to myself. “I’m riding a bike!”
I pedalled to the end of our street, ecstatic. Although I had logged thousands of kilometres, literally, on my handcycle, riding a conventional bike is a completely different experience. A handcycle sits low to the ground, the pedals right at eye level. On the newer models, the rider has to nearly lie down. Now I was sitting up high, pedalling away. My arms hardly knew what to do with my legs now doing all the work.
I was having so much fun pedalling down the street that I forgot that the hardest part of my first ride was just ahead. My street dead-ends. When I reached the end, I would have to turn around. Suddenly I flashed back to the first time I rode a bike as a little boy. Turning is much more difficult than just going straight. I slowed down a bit and tentatively turned the handlebars. I felt very wobbly on the turn but managed to stay upright.
As I started back up my street, Paul had just gotten off his bike and was changing his shoes to go for a run when he saw me ride by. “John! You’re doing it! Oh my God! You’re riding a bike!”
That nearly did me in. My concentration broke for just a moment, and I nearly fell off. Focus, focus! I told myself. Don’t fall. I regained my balance and managed to stay upright.
“I didn’t realise you were going to try to ride this morning!” he said.
“Well, you know,” I said, grinning like a Cheshire cat. The two of us had a chat as he ran alongside me. It was as though this were something the two of us did every day, as if we had just done it the day before.
I reached my house, pulled over to the kerb and climbed off. I went inside. “The pedals worked,” I told Amanda.
“What?” she said.
“They worked. I rode your bike up the street and back.”
“I thought you were going to wait for me.”
“Well . . .” I stammered. “I couldn’t.”
Amanda was not surprised. “I guess that’s to be expected,” she said. “Was it okay?”
I just smiled. I couldn’t find the words to describe what I felt inside. Honestly, I truly was a little boy who just received his first bike. The fourteen-year-old me, the one who rode his new bike until he was too exhausted to even put it away at night, came out. As I rode up and down my street, a switch flipped inside me. All at once it was as though I had never sat down in an outrigger or kayak and never touched a paddle. The sport suddenly no longer existed for me. I’d returned to a much older love, and I could not wait to explore and exploit, to see how far I could go.
I rode back up and down the street several times that day. As I rode along, a question came to me, one I knew I had to pursue with everything in me. I wonder, I asked myself, if it is now possible for me to go back and do a triathlon, not in a wheelchair but as a conventional athlete. The thought should have struck me as crazy. Instead it felt like the next chapter of my life was about to unfold.
16
From Peter Parker to Spider-Man
* * *
Very soon after riding a conventional bike for the first time, I called an old friend, Gordon Bell. Gordie and I go back to my first attempt at the Hawaiian Ironman in 1995, when he made sure I was included in the Australian contingent. I didn’t know any of the guys, but Gordie pulled me into the club. He even had an Aussie flag strapped to my racing chair. Right before the race began, in the water, Gordon was close by when a guy yelled out, “Hey, you can’t wear a wet suit!” Before I could say a word, Gordie answered, “He’s in a wheelchair, you idiot.” Two years later, in the 1997 Ironman, Gordon and I crossed the finish line together. It wasn’t anything we planned. The two of us just happened to finish at the same time. Gordon was now the race director for the Nepean Triathlon, which is why I called him.
“I wanted to let you know I would like to enter the triathlon this year,” I said.
“That’s great, John. You know how much we love to have you in the race. Any time you can make it, we want you here,” Gordon replied. I’ve done the Nepean several times beyond those mentioned previously in this book.
“Thank you,” I said, “but I’m not asking as a wheelchair athlete. Gordie, this year, I would like to enter as a conventional athlete.”
“What?” Gordon said, very, very confused.
“I said I want to enter as a conventional athlete.”
“Okay. Wait. What? I mean, uh, John—how?”
I gave Gordon the condensed version of what had happened over the last several months. Up until this phone call, I hadn’t made a secret of regaining substantial use of my legs, but I also had not gone out of my way to let people outside my circle of family and friends know about it.
“Wow,” Gordon said, obviously stunned. “That’s extraordinary, John. Please keep me up to date as to what you want to do.”
“Right now, my intention is to do the triathlon in October, eight months from now. So if you could allow me to race, then we’ll put it all together and see how it goes,” I said.
“Of course, John,” Gordon said. “You can race however you want to race.”
I hung up the phone and knew I had stepped over a line into a new normal. First, I had now, in my own mind, moved from “John Maclean, wheelchair athlete and Paralympian” to “John Maclean, aspiring triathlete”. And my first triathlon had to be the Nepean, the very race for which I was training at the time of my accident in 1988 and the first triathlon in which I competed as a wheelie six years later. The 1994 Nepean proved to be the springboard for everything that followed. Now, here I was twenty years later, ready to go back for another new beginning. The same questions I asked myself in 1994 I asked myself now: If I can do the Nepean, then what else is possible? How far can I go with this?
I had also already started thinking about ways to do more with the triathlon than simply compete. If I could ride a bike thirty kilometres after a one-kilometre swim, then get off the bike and walk ten kilometres, then this would truly be something newsworthy. I began to envision the upcoming Nepean Triathlon as the perfect fund-raiser for my foundation, while also opening a whole new discussion about what is possible for those with physical challenges. Walking was no longer just about me. I started the John Maclean Foundation because I wanted to make a difference in the lives of children in wheelchairs. On my feet, competing in a triathlon as a conventional athlete, I now had the opportunity to make the greatest impact yet.
After I got off the phone with Gordon, I made another couple of calls. I needed to find good homes for a couple of pieces of equipment I no longer had any use for. I called one friend and offered him my racing chair. I gave the handcycle to another. I’ve always believed if I was going to do something, I was going to give it 100 per cent. As long as the racing chair and handcycle sat in my garage, I had an out, a way to default back to the comfortable and familiar. In order for me to give my all as a conventional athlete, I had to burn my bridges, so to speak. Now I was committed. There was no turning back.
As if “burning my bridges” didn’t solidify my resolve to complete the Nepean Triathlon as a conventional athlete, I took it a step further when I mentioned my plans during an interview with a reporter from Australia’s 60 Minutes. They were doing a feature for the show on my learning to walk again. I just sort of blurted out the triathlon when she asked me what w
as next for John Maclean. It is a very common question. Every time I speak, people always ask me what I am going to do next. My friends even do it. Before I decided to enter the Nepean, friends had already started talking about me going back to Kona to do the Ironman.
Since everyone else asks what I am going to do next, it only made sense for 60 Minutes to do the same. During the actual broadcast, they did not include me talking about the Nepean Triathlon, but at the close of the report the host added, “We wish John the best of luck as he trains for the Nepean Triathlon in October of this year.” With that, there was no changing my mind or backing out. My course was set. It was Nepean or bust.
The 60 Minutes piece was a turning point for me in other ways as well. My walking had not just gone public; it was now a national news item. The 60 Minutes report began with me in my wheelchair, rolling along a pier on Sydney Harbour. It ended with me “running” one hundred metres while the reporter clicked off my time with a stopwatch. In between, viewers met Amanda and Jack along with Ken Ware and my spinal specialist, Dr John Yeo. Clips included my sporting past, all of which built up to the video of my first three steps with Ken. The reporter took Ken and me back to the beach to recreate my first run, as well as put me back on a trampoline to show what I could do there. It ended with Amanda and me together. The reporter said, “I get the feeling you are incredibly content with where you are.”
“Life’s fantastic,” I replied. “I have a beautiful wife and an amazing little boy. What more could you ask for?”