Out-of-Body Skiing
With Event One—the High-Speed Human Shot-Put—firmly in hand (pun intended), I moved on to my main event—training as a racer for the alpine downhill competition at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Paralympic Games.
It’s worth mentioning that in order to ski without an arm and a leg, you are required to make a few basic preliminary decisions before heading up the mountain. These decisions fall conspicuously outside the realm of selecting ear warmers or mittens. They are:
- One leg or two?
- One ski or two?
- One arm or two?
- One pole or two?
- Regular poles or outriggers?
- Follow convention or innovate?
As a rule, people missing a leg use one ski, balancing their residual limb in limbo (pun just now created) with the aid of two “outriggers”—adaptive crutches modified with mini-skis at their base. I can tell you now, that rule was going to be broken. Skiing on one ski with the aid of only one outrigger seems a little risky to this train spotter. I mean, I like my face just the way it is. Furthermore, the functional benefits of using my prosthetic arm to hold a pole, when weighed against the risk of shredding a $43,000 bionic upper-extremity in a high-speed ski crash, was not something I wanted to explain to Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
No … I would ski with one pole. And since I’d been using my XT-9 Energy Storing Knee (XT-9.com) in early attempts on the bunny slope … contrary to usual practice, I was gonna ski two-skied. So here’s the profile:
- Two legs
- Two skis
- One arm
- One outrigger
- One goal!!!
It was with this plan that I headed into the New Year, after skiing during the last two days of 2007. What followed was eight weeks of tweaking and training. I have some very exciting news to report, and it’s not all good. In the adaptive world, we call these experiences, and the information gleaned from them, “learnings.” Sounds so amenable. Not always.
I “learned” firsthand that prosthetic screws tight enough for everyday walking are not tight enough for skiing. I had this pounded into my very non-bionic skull as my prosthetic leg twisted beneath me like Oksana Baiul performing a tight spin on the competition ice. Great for figure skating. For downhill skiing, not so much. When we tightened down the knee, the ankle would rotate, when we tightened down the ankle, the knee would act up again. I felt less like Bode Miller, and more like that Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, trying to direct my body using two skis and conspicuously absent joints. Finally, we pinned all the joint areas (read: welded) and all was well. Thank God, because the following weekend was my first ever Disabled Sports USA Level 1 Race, and I was out for pre-Paralympic glory.
I arrived a day early, to train a little and meet the folks from Vermont Adaptive Ski & Sport, one of the East Coast’s premiere skiing and racing outfits. Up until now, I’d been skiing mostly on my own and hadn’t yet met many adaptive skiers. There were thirty other racers in the field. Would they be good … would I be good? Walking into the lodge to register, I began to see and size up the competition. There were amputees. There were paraplegics. There were blind skiers. My first thought was, I can win this thing.
My second thought was, wow, look at all these people with all these challenges. What could have happened to make that person blind? Was it an accident? Was he blind at birth? What would I do if I were in a wheelchair, blind or somehow mentally challenged? I mean, what am I doing here? Look at me, I’m … well … I’m … and then, it hit me.
I’m missing an arm and a leg. Eternally modified by a single moment in time. But in that moment, with all those people there, I completely forgot about my “disability” (more on that misnomer later) and was consumed with empathy for all these other poor racers in the room. I realized that my “whole body image” had not been injured or “dismembered” (more on that one, too) at the time of the train wreck, or even during my recovery afterward. My body image at that moment was still the one I had of myself at age twenty-two, exercising like a freak, learning photography, and being unconditionally narcissistic.
