One More Step: My Story of Living With Cerebral Palsy, Climbing Kilimanjaro, and Surviving The Hardest Race On Earth by Bonner Paddock (Excerpt)
One More Step: My Story of Living With Cerebral Palsy, Climbing Kilimanjaro, and Surviving The Hardest Race On Earth by Bonner Paddock (Excerpt)
One More Step: My Story of Living With Cerebral Palsy, Climbing Kilimanjaro, and Surviving The Hardest Race On Earth by Bonner Paddock (Excerpt)
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Bonner Paddock
with Neal Bascomb
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Contents
Prologue: Fight Your Fight
1.
Normal. Happy.
2.
A Boy Named Jake
17
3.
Swimming in the Riptides
33
4. The Mountain
47
5.
Its About to Get Real
69
6.
The Wall
89
7.
Fire in the Furnace
107
125
9.
Swim. Bike. Run.
151
10. Brothers169
11. I Told You This Wasnt Going to Be Easy
191
211
13. Go Time
227
243
265
275
Acknowledgments
279
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Prologue
orce away the pain. Fight your fight. One more step. You are an Ironman, Bonner Paddock. You are an Ironman.
I silently repeat it, over and over. You are an Ironman. The
words are a promise. They are an aspiration. If I finishno, when I
finishbefore the midnight cutoff, the announcer will shout them
out to the world, and they will become fact. But right now I am
running alone in the inky blackness of a Hawaiian island night, my
headlamp is casting a small wobbling circle of light on the broken
pavement ahead, and I am struggling.
Passing into my 17th mile, I know I am in trouble. Every inch of
my body screams in pain. I want nothing more than to stop, collapse into a heap, and end this torture. With each troubled stride, my
knees bend in, and my ankles flail out: my legs are breaking down.
At some point, fast approaching, determination will no longer be
enough to keep me moving.
One second I want to quit. The next, I force away the thought. I
have battled these doubts throughout the 2.4-mile swim in swelling
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seas, on the 112-mile bike ride in devil-searing heat, and now during
the final miles of the marathon run of the 2012 Ironman World
Championship.
You are an Ironman. Force away the pain. Fight your fight. One more
step. You are an Ironman. My mantra keeps me moving for another
hundred yards, but then I slow down, almost to a walk.
Im running through the Natural Energy Laboratory property,
just off the Queen Kaahumanu Highway. The government installation is the farthest point away from Kailua-Kona, home base. The
Energy Lab is dark, cant-see-your-hand-in-f ront-of-your-face dark.
Day or night, it is creepy too, with windowless sheet-metal buildings and huge black pipelines that snake through the grounds before
plunging into the ocean. Worst of all, the lab boasts the reputation,
confirmed many times by my coach, Ironman legend Greg Welch,
for being the place that makes or breaks competitors. Top pros have
entered this stretch, roughly Miles 1619 of the marathon, in the lead
only to fall far behind by the time they emerge. Many other racers
have left on stretchers. The heat, the absence of a breeze, the sheer
haunting barrennessthey are often too much to bear.
Time is running out for me. Since 7 a.m., when the sun rose over
the summit of Mount Hualalai, one of the Big Islands five active
volcanoes, Ive been pushing my body. More than fourteen hours
with no rest and no reprieve. My legs feel mashed to a pulp. My feet
burn with every step, each foot a wet, bloody, swelling mess laced
into its shoe. At any moment the race officialsGrim Reapers on
scootersare going to sweep me up.
Too slow, Bonner. You wont make the cutoff, they will say.
No can do, theyll continue. Were sorry. You had a good race.
At least you gave it your best.
No.
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My best I have yet to give. I dig inside of myself, deeper than before. I quicken my pace slightly, but enough to bring the pain roaring
back. So be it. Use the pain. Ignore the rest. Step after step. I head down
toward the ocean, then bank right, going north now.
I worry that I am sweating too much. I worry that I am moving
too fast. Then I worry that I am moving too slowly. I want to know
the time, but I worry that if I look at my watch I will lose my balance
and fall. I need to use my sight to keep my balance. I worry about the
rising twinge in my ankles. I worry that my body is not keeping in
any of liquid I am drinking. I worry that I am hitting the wall, that
Ill faint. I worry that I will stumble off the road into the lava fields
and that nobody will know where Ive gone. There I will lie until
they find me, and all that will remain will be the desiccated skeleton
of Bonner Paddock. I am not thinking straight, havent for hours. I
feel so isolated and so alone.
Keep the strides long, mate. Keep your pace even, Welchy says.
Move your arms. I turn to find my coach jogging along beside me.
Hes wearing flip-flops. How I would love to be wearing flip-flops.
His wife, Sian, also an Ironman champion, is chugging down the
road on a scooter. Why are they here? I left them back on the Queen
K Highway before I turned into the Energy Lab. They said they
would meet me at the finish.
Ill never quit, Welchy, I say.
I know, he says. Just remember to drink chicken broth at the
next aid station and keep running your own race.
Okay, okay.
Theres a ton of big blue cowboy hats waiting at the finish for you.
My body trembles. My toes explode with each step. I stare down
at the road. When I look back to my coach, he is gone, as is Sian. Poof.
As if they were never there.
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1
Normal. Happy.
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b o n n e r pa d d o ck
and told him that I used to play goalie on my college soccer team.
Paul was surprised at how independent and physically able I was.
When he asked what specific kind of CP I had, I didnt answer. I
didnt know. At the end of our lunch, he invited me to speak to the
UCP-OC board, with a mind to joining.
So a few weeks later, early in the morning, there I was. At the
time, the UCP-OC was headquartered in a ground-floor office in a
business park off I-5. I went through the door. In a room adjacent to
the reception area, behind a wall of glass, sat the board members
around a big table. A dozen pair of eyes looked at me, and suddenly
I felt my heart sink into my wingtip shoes. Its one thing to put in
a few hours of volunteering; its another thing entirely to stand in
front of a room to speak about my CP. I had never done it and had
never wanted toever. Yet there I was.
Paul Pulver came out from the boardroom.
Hang tight, he said. Well be right with you.
Decades passed in those short moments. I sweated. My hand
trembled. If someone had opened a window, I might have crawled
out of it. Then I was led inside. I shook some hands and introduced
myself, but I wasnt seeing or hearing anything. Finally, everybody
returned to their seats except me. I stood in front of the table, feeling the way I imagined an alcoholic would at his first AA meeting,
admitting my CP as if it were something to be ashamed of. Nervous,
staring at a spot on the table in front of me, I told my storypart of
it anyway.
n May 22, 1975, during my first seconds out in this world, I gasped
for breath. The umbilical cord was wrapped twice around my
neck. My mother, Andrea, on her third natural childbirth, wondered
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why the hospital room was so quiet. I should have been crying, making a big fuss.
Shouldnt we be hearing from that baby down there? she asked,
worried.
You will, the doctor answered.
Only after he loosened the accidental noose did my pale, almost
lifeless body get some air at last. But the damage to my brain as a
result of being starved of precious blood flow was done. Numerous areas suffered from the cerebral anoxia (lack of oxygen) at this
precious moment of lifewhite matter, neural connections, and a
bunch of things that go by Latin terms, half of which I dont understand to this dayand maybe for good reason, because the anoxia
played havoc inside my head, destroying at random some serious
brain matter.
Once I had some air, though, and the doctor gave me a firm slap
on my buns, I wailed and flailed like any other newborn. The doctor told my mother and my father, Tom, that there might be some
impact from the wrapped cord, but then again there might not. Any
tests at that point would be inconclusive. They were to have faith.
Eight hours later, my mother was eager to get home, and I left the
hospital, all chubby eight pounds and two ounces of me, swaddled in
a blanket and out to make my way in life. To any and all who looked
on, I was just another standard-issue baby.
I had two older brothers, Mike and Mattmy mother called
me Me Threeand I sat up, crawled, stood, and walked earlier
than they did, but everything was just that little bit different. When
I was sitting on the floor, my legs were angled awkwardly behind
me. Crawling, Id haul my body forward by my arms, dragging my
legs behind me like a commando advancing under low barbed wire.
Standing, I wobbled in at the knees and curled my toes underneath
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with his family medical history. Mike, who, like the rest of us, had
pushed my syringomyelia diagnosis out of his mind, simply told the
doctor that one of his brothers walked kind of weird. The neurologist asked to see me.
My mother was all for it, but I, now eleven years old, wanted
nothing more to do with doctors. Mike offered a deal: if I went,
I could spend the night with him at college and go to his classes.
Bribes worked wonders on me.
It turned out that Mikes neurologist was not just any neurologist.
His name was Dr. Arnold Starr, the department head at UCI and a
cutting-edge researcher. He was in his late fifties, with a goatee and
a mad professor shock of hair. He peered around the mountain of
patients files on his desk and took my medical history. My mother
mentioned the syringomyelia. Dr. Starr asked if I had ever had an
MRI. The answer was no.
Then he leaned over his desk, elbows firmly placed on a low stack
of manila folders, and said to my mother, You cant diagnose syringomyelia without an MRI. There is no other diagnostic for the condition. If Bonner didnt have that test, then the diagnosis cant hold.
Dr. Starr then gave me a thorough physical exam and sent me
for a battery of tests: MRI, CT, EEG, blood tests, the works. I didnt
much want to be rolled into the MRI machine, which looked like a
tomb, but Mom dangled the bribe in front of me. Still as a stone, I
let the machine make its rat-a-tat-tat ruckus as it peered inside my
brain. Then came even more tests, poking, prodding, stabbing, and
examining my every movement, hour after hour.
While we were waiting for the test results, my big night on the
UCI campus came. Mike lived in an apartment a half block from
the beach in an area named, for its wild parties, the War Zone. I
stayed up late, ate pizza, listened to loud music, and fed roaches to
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Mikes oscar fish. Gobble. Gobble. All the girls pinched my cheeks,
and I felt like a big shot. The next day, I went to his classes with him.
Economics was a drag, but next came Humanities. I was sitting in
the back row, eyes wide open, when the professor started talking
about human sexuality. With details, lots of wondrous details. Mike
clamped his hands over my ears and ushered me out the door.
We went back to see Dr. Starr a month later. As he spoke to my
mother, his words rolled over me. I was thinking mostly about his
black convertible Porsche with the red leather interior that he had
promised to take me driving in, once all the tests were done.
Well, Ill tell you the good news, Dr. Starr said. Theres no way
Bonner has syringomyelia.
No wheelchair at fourteen? My mother replied. No
Absolutely not. No demise at twenty years of age either.
So, what is it?
Bonner has cerebral palsy.
Is that like MS? my mother asked.
No, muscular sclerosis is progressive and degenerative. Cerebral
palsy is chronic, but nonprogressive. This was doctor speak for,
You got it, and it aint going away, but it doesnt get better or worse
over time.
My cerebral palsy, Dr. Starr went on to say, was the result of the
damage inflicted during those precious first seconds of life when I
was starved of oxygen. It was a disorder of the brain, causing g arbled
messages to be sent out to the body, primarily impacting motor
function.
No two manifestations of CP were alike. Some of the most severe
cases left p eople bound to wheelchairs for life, unable to control their
movements, their arms and their legs often crooked and locked. I fell
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t the end of my talk to the board at UCP-OC, I offered to do anything I could to help their work, shook hands with everyone,
passed out my business cards (a salesman always), and left. As I
walked to my car, my hands settling from the shakes, I felt a tremendous weight fall from my shoulders. This was the first time I had
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