If you look at it from one perspective, Rose O’Neil failed to accomplish what she set out to do.
She crossed the finish line twenty minutes after the race ended, after the big blue blow-up start-finish line had been de-inflated. The race was officially over. The timer was no longer timing.
Indeed, the awards ceremony was nearly over.
Officially, it was a DNF: Did Not Finish.
And she spent the better part of the next week having to use crutches because of the damage she did to her leg.
Sure, you can look at what she did and say she failed. If you’re a complete ass.
Because there are multiple perspectives to look through. And there are multiple ways to challenge yourself.
One of the original tag lines for the race was “Run with the goats, cruise with the caribou or trot with the ptarmigan.” The idea there was not everyone is at the same level. Not everyone is a Kris Swanson. But everyone can challenge themselves, where ever they are at. For some, it is to do better than the year before. Rose herself tells the story of how she was nearly the last person across the finish line the first year she did the race. But she loved the concept of running in the mountains and the next year? She cut nearly a full hour off her time. The year after that? She finished in 2:37:46, nearly two hours ahead of how she did the first year.
If she had looked at her first result and said “man, that was terrible. I should just quit,” there would be no story of her race this year. Who knows what path her life would be on now? It certainly wouldn’t have involved running 20 km up and over a mountain with one freaking leg.
Because I don’t know about you, but Rose’s story is not one of failure.
You only fail, you see, if you fall and don’t get back up. If you don’t learn from your mistakes. If you don’t struggle with the hand that fate has dealt you.
Because sometimes, life sucks.
Meiko Georgouras knows that better than most. The Melbourne artist suffered a severe brain injury that left her unable to move or speak, but still mentally aware.
Trapped inside her body, her therapist used a device that tracked eye movement to help her communicate. The idea was to be able to look at words to create sentences, but instead, she started using the system to create digital paintings.
Or how about Franklin Delano Roosevelt? He was on the 1920s presidential ticket as vice-president with James Cox. The two were spanked by the Republicans.
Even worse, the next year he fell sick and was left paralyzed from the waist down.
His mother told him to quit. To get out of politics. He had nothing to prove, and he was in a wheelchair, she said.
But Roosevelt did have something to prove. In 1929, he became governor of New York. In 1932, he became president of the United States.
At the time, most buildings were not wheelchair accessible, so FDR designed his own wheelchair to get around in. He used a dining chair and replaced the legs with bicycle-like wheels. The chair was small and could move around tight corners and narrow hallways with ease.
But FDR didn’t want people to look at him as incapable, so he learned how to walk again. He wore braces that locked his knees straight, so he could stand. Then, using a cane and the arm of someone for balance, he would maneuver his hips and swing is legs forward in a swaying motion to make it appear as if he was walking.
And, despite being a paraplegic in a time when any form of disability was considered a weakness, FDR lead the country through the great depression, his “new deal” helped redefine liberalism in the US. He won four presidential elections in a country where two is considered the max, and he led the US through World War II, turning the nation into a superpower in the process.
In 1938, he founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, leading to the development of polio vaccines.
FDR was afflicted with a diseases that left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair, yet it didn’t stop him.
And sure, running the Emperor’s Challenge and missing the cut-off is an accomplishment on a different level than changing the economic prosperity of an entire country, but that’s sort of my point. Everyone has challenges to face, and just because you don’t get elected president when you overcome them doesn’t make your success any less valid.
As Rose O’Neil came past me (I was, as usual, the peak photographer), she was second to last. “Not even last,” I called out. “You’re going to have to slow down.”
“Not a chance,” she replied. She posed for a photo or two, then continued on, her gait strong and determined. She’s already got a plan for next year, running an ultra-marathon, and another kick at the Emperor’s Challenge. “The fact is, as long as you are moving you are successful,” she says. “So many amputees I counsel feel like their lives are over. I am proving that you are the only obstacle in your path and you just have to move out of your own way. Life is what you make it, richness is in how you challenge yourself.”
To conclude, let’s give the final word to FDR himself: “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’…You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
