"I had so much difficulty getting down to the depth of emotion in conversation
and I wanted to be able to hand something over and say,‘Here, read this.
This is what I went through.'" Warren Macdonald on writing about his changed life.

Published 2007-02-15 09:02:05Top articles in Features

Between a rock and a hard place
Athletes with big stories to live, realities to redefine, and disabilities. (In that order.)

By Lisa Richardson

Ice-climber. Passionate environmental activist. Inspirational speaker. Author. Vancouver-based Aussie expat. That’s Warren Macdonald.

He’s also 3 foot 11, and has no legs.

Whistler’s Matt Hallatt is a 2010 contender. A golf pro with a 6 handicap, Hallatt has put university on the backburner to pursue the podium, having cut his teeth at the Torino Games.

Hallatt lost his right leg to cancer at the age of six.

Nobody knows what significant events occurred in the lives of Mike Janyk or Erik Guay when they were six years old or what challenges they will have to overcome to ski race their way to the 2010 Games. Most stories about Matt Hallatt, though, mention his leg in the first paragraph. It seems that it’s only when you’re able-bodied that the pursuit of excellence is story enough.

• • •

Warren Macdonald’s memoir of pursuing excellence begins on April 9 1997. He’d lived 31 years worth of stories up until that moment. And he’s spent the last 10 years living even bigger ones, as if to make sure that things didn’t stop there.

“In some ways, what happened on April 9th feels like a lifetime ago,” he told Pique Newsmagazine in a recent interview. “And yet, it’s so clear to me it could have happened yesterday…”

That was when the Aussie adventurer embarked on a solo hike on Hinchinbrook Island, off Queensland’s coast.

A world-wanderer and eco-warrior who’d spent years living in Tasmania’s wild southwest fighting for the old-growth forest, Macdonald was wont to go bush when he needed a good fix of peace of mind. He had been running his own painting business in Airlie Beach and had spent seven months partying as hard as he was working. It was time to get back down to earth.

Macdonald caught the ferry to Hinchinbrook with four days up his sleeve and a backpack full of provisions.

Three days later, he would leave in a helicopter on a spinal board.

But on April 8, he was hiking and swimming his way along the beach. After setting up camp, he met Geert van Keulen, a Dutch traveler who was planning to summit the island’s highest peak the following day. It was an adventure that Macdonald was immediately drawn to.

They set off after breakfast, and though Van Keulen wasn’t much of a bush-whacker, Macdonald was relaxed and in his element, enjoying the companionship.

By nightfall, they still hadn’t found the campsite that Van Keulen’s scribbled trail notes referred to. Figuring they must have taken a wrong turn, the pair set up a bivouac on a flat stone and cooked up dinner.

In the dark, as Van Keulen collapsed onto his Thermarest with relief, Macdonald tiptoed across mossy rocks to take a discrete leak away from the creekbed. As he levered himself up over a granite boulder, the one tonne chunk of rock gave way.

Two cracks followed in quick succession. The boulder disengaging. And then his pelvis fracturing, as the rock pinned him to the ground.

“The moment the rock impacted has been literally erased from my memory,” says Macdonald. “I think our minds do that when something is just too much to bear, like a kind of protection mechanism. But everything else is quite clear to me; the two days of waiting; the terror of thinking I would drown as the river rose; the incredible loneliness at watching Geert walk away…”

Macdonald’s horror story had just begun. Van Keulen was roused by his screaming, and they spent the night trying to lever the boulder off him with branches and chockstones and brute force and desperate desire.

But it wasn’t enough.

When day broke, Van Keulen went for help.

And Macdonald had to simply wait. For 45 hours, with a fractured pelvis and crushed legs, as the rain came down, the river rose around him, angry ants swarmed him, and his new companion stumbled back down the mountain, Macdonald’s will to live was tested.

He survived.

But the toughest part of the journey was still ahead. Back at Cairns Base Hospital, both his legs were amputated above the knee, and a grueling rehabilitation followed.

Everything had to be learned again. How to balance upright. How to take care of himself. How to not drown in the bathtub. How to get around.

He fought to connect with his old life — getting worked over in the surf without the flotation provided by legs, making a slow determined summit of Tasmania’s Cradle Mountain, refusing to be a victim.

Through the accident, the rehab and the audacious mountain climbing goals he set for himself, Macdonald says the hardest thing of all was “learning to ask for help.”

But help came, from family and friends and therapists and care-givers, and Macdonald felt a desire to explain to them what had happened. So he started writing.

“I didn’t actually set out to write a book in the beginning,” he says of the scribblings that would become A Test of Will: One Man’s Extraordinary Story of Survival.

“I just wanted to write the experience of the accident down so I could share it with family and friends because I had so much difficulty getting down to the depth of emotion in conversation and I wanted to be able to hand something over and say, ‘Here, read this. This is what I went through.’”

The book is a naked and gripping account of the accident, the surgery and his recovery — a story he has since told and retold in person hundreds of times — on Oprah and Larry King Live, to school kids in remote Australia towns, to corporate suits needing a dose of inspiration.

They all respond in different ways. Some are very emotional. “That’s always hard for me,” he says. “I might be okay at emotion on the page but I’m not great at it in real life. I find it really confronting when people react that way. Sometimes its more emotional that others; I’ve had times when I’ve really started to choke up during parts of the story, which isn’t much fun in front of lots of people….”

But he’s working on embracing that.

It is part of the story, after all.

• • •

In three years time, a new chapter will unfold in Whistler’s story — the tale of a town that plays host to the 10th Paralympic Winter Games.

For most of us, the closest we’ll get to the opening and closing ceremonies for the Olympics will be via our high-definition television sets.

But most of the Paralympic Games will take place right here in Whistler starting on March 12, followed by the closing ceremony in Whistler on March 21.

And if the Paralympics are the Cinderella Games, then 2010 is the fairy godmother for this overlooked sibling of competitive sports, turning rags into swish uniforms, clunky old names like “Disabled Alpine Ski Team” into catchy handles like “Para-Alpine Ski Team”, and loonies into toonies with Own the Podium funding.

Leslie Clarke, head coach for the Canadian Para-Alpine Ski Team, says that 2010 is definitely the event horizon for the 12 senior and nine development athletes on her team. And it’s going to change what it’s like to be an athlete with a disability in Canada.

Own the Podium’s target for Canada is to take third in the medal tally at the Paralympics. So the Leslie Clarke-and-one-assistant-coach team that guided the Para-Alpine athletes a year and a half ago, has been magically transformed into a team of two fulltime coaches working directly with the athletes under Clarke as head coach, a sports psychologist, a fitness therapist and a High Performance Director at Alpine Canada.

“It’s been incredible,” says Clarke. “Before, it was just me trying to figure it all out. Now it’s an athlete-driven program. We have the resources to deliver coaching that meets the individual needs of our athletes. We can give them one-on-one development.”

And it seems to be working. “We had five medals — one more than predicted — in Torino,” says Clarke, of the results that put the Canadians fourth in the world and contributed to 38 per cent of the nation’s medal haul at the Games. And those results were no fluke. The Para-Alpine Ski Team’s results for the season included 24 World Cup podiums and seven crystal globes.

“I don’t think people quite get it,” says Clarke. “It’s huge to get a World Cup medal. For us, too.”

But the accomplishments are often overshadowed by the disabilities.

As a professional coach with 20 years experience, Clarke is working with athletes first. The terminology is shifting in recognition of this. Awad — athlete with a disability. As distinct from “disabled athlete.” The athlete comes first.

It’s the way the Para-Alpine team’s coaches start. “The biggest thing with working with athletes with a disability,” explains Clarke, “is to recognize what they can do. Then you work with the support team, the physiotherapist, the fitness trainer, to get an idea of their honest limitations.”

Clarke has been with the team for five years, the last three as head coach. She says, because of her own personality, it took her a long time to ask her athletes to share their stories, but newer coaches would just come right out and ask, “So, how’d you end up in a chair?”

“The athletes will share,” she says. “They don’t have a problem telling their stories. But they’re not playing the disabled card.”

That option was left behind when they committed to the rigorous training regime required of an elite athlete.

The challenge is, it’s the card the world keeps turning up.

• • •

Warren Macdonald has summited Africa’s highest peak, sat on a stage with David Suzuki, and been featured in several documentaries. He’s become so adept at navigating life without legs that it doesn’t cross his mind to miss them. “I did in the beginning. I couldn’t believe they were gone, that part of me was gone forever. I marvel at the mechanics sometimes just watching people walk down the street, or run, or getting up from a chair; it’s such a subconscious action for us when we have two legs that is utterly fascinating from my perspective now.”

He’s also become adept at navigating the media, so he’s not holding his breath for the day when sound-byte addicted journalists will focus on athletes being athletes. “I think their focus on the ‘story’ of our trauma is only natural. We are different; there’s no getting around it. For me personally, I was definitely out to prove something, to myself and the world. I was like the Black Knight in the Holy Grail with the ‘Fuck you; if you think this is going to slow me down you’ve got another thing coming’ attitude. These days when I set out to do something it’s more from a sense of belief in how we create our own reality. Guys with no legs aren’t supposed to climb almost 6,000 metre mountains. I set out to redefine that reality…”

And the reality of the 2010 Paralympic Games is coming our way. Leslie Clarke is confident that people will see the athletic excellence of the world’s para-competitors in 2010 and be blown away. “People are going to get it. But it will be too late. It’s a shame we can’t have a big pre-event in Whistler, so people can see beforehand.”

Because the reality is that this event is not about patronizing people who need to have a special program of their own. It’s simply about the pursuit of excellence. Matt Hallatt and Erik Guay have more in common with each other than they have with the rest of us. “They’re equals,” says Clarke. “They wouldn’t compete against each other, but you don’t compare men with women either. They are simply the best at what they do and we take pride in that.”

“We all have our own insecurities, disabilities, burdens to overcome,” she says. “Most of us just don’t wear them on the outside. But being an athlete with a disability is not a cause. It’s a lifestyle. It’s about choosing to do what you want to do.”

The relentless pursuit of excellence.

Because that’s a story that’s big enough.