Dedication
To Jake,
for igniting this journey and for being there
every step of the way . . . my inspiration.
Epigraph
You gain strength, and courage, and confidence by
every experience in which you really stop to look
fear in the face . . . you must do the thing
you think you cannot do.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
Not everything that is face can be changed, but
nothing can be changed until it is faced.
—James Baldwin
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: Fight Your Fight
1. Normal. Happy.
2. A Boy Named Jake
3. Swimming in the Riptides
4. The Mountain
5. It’s About to Get Real
6. The Wall
7. Fire in the Furnace
8. The Fun-House Mirror
9. Swim. Bike. Run.
10. Brothers
11. I Told You This Wasn’t Going to Be Easy
12. Me Against the Island
13. Go Time
14. Man of Iron
Photo Section
Epilogue: One Man, One Mission.
Afterword by the Robert Family
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
Fight Your Fight
Force 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 finish—no, when I finish—before 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 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.
I’m running through the Natural Energy Laboratory property, just off the Queen Ka’ahumanu Highway. The government installation is the farthest point away from Kailua-Kona, home base. The Energy Lab is dark, can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-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 16–19 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 barrenness—they 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 Island’s five active volcanoes, I’ve 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 officials—Grim Reapers on scooters—are going to sweep me up.
“Too slow, Bonner. You won’t make the cutoff,” they will say.
“No can do,” they’ll continue. “We’re sorry. You had a good race. At least you gave it your best.”
No.
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 the liquid I am drinking. I worry that I am hitting the wall, that I’ll faint. I worry that I will stumble off the road into the lava fields and that nobody will know where I’ve 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, haven’t 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. He’s 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.
“I’ll 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.”
“There’s 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.
I am not alone, I remind myself. I never have been. My coach is with me. All my friends and family down at the finish line in big blue foam cowboy hats are with me. My brother Mike, who saw me through every bump and roadblock of this journey, is with me. Juliana is with me. Steve Robert and his family are with me. And Jake, dear Jakey, is with me, as he was at the very beginning when I knew absolutely nothing of myself—and accepted even less.
Ahead I see a bright white light. It’s not heaven, but close enough. It’s the Energy Lab turnaround. Once I reach it, I will be heading back toward the finish, toward home.
Force away the pain. Fight your fight. One more step. You are an Ironman, Bonner Paddock. You are an Ironman.
1
Normal. Happy.
The alarm buzzed. I hit the snooze button. The alarm buzzed again. I hit snooze again and turned over. On the third buzz, I sat up in bed. Time to get the day on. It was March 2005. Life was good. Life was normal. At twenty-nine, I finally had some money in my pocket and a dream sales job on a professional sports team. Yes, I had racked up some serious credit-card and student-loan debt, but who hadn’t at my age, I figured.
I lived in Newport Coast, California, a mile from the ocean, in a one-bedroom, 850-square-foot bachelor pad. I had the big-screen TV, racks of CDs, a closet full of suits, an oversized couch, and a refrigerator with all the essentials: beer, mustard, ketchup, Tabasco sauce, and flour tortillas for bean a
nd cheese burritos. The beige walls, which matched the beige carpet, were bare but for a black-and-white photograph of some hanging garlic taken by my grandfather. The apartment complex boasted a pool and a small gym. The silver Lexus parked in the garage was perfect for rolling to work and for getting to parties on the weekends (or even during the week—hey, I was young). Normal. Happy.
The fact of my having cerebral palsy? Only my family and close friends knew about that—and then not all of them did. Because the nature of my cerebral palsy allowed me to keep it a secret, that was exactly what I did. Sitting across from me at a meeting or over dinner, people saw a big guy, six foot four, with the wingspan of a basketball player and hair that was maybe thinning a little too early. I smiled a lot and talked fast and furiously. Nothing wrong with me. All was well.
That morning when I finally rolled out of bed and put my feet on the floor was like every morning. There was no avoiding the stiffness and pain. Try holding your hand tight in a fist for as long as possible. Really concentrate and push yourself. Feel that burn start in your fingers and then move down your wrist into your forearm. That is how my feet, calves, hamstrings, quads, glutes, and lower back feel—all the time. There is no loosening, no release. Every morning it feels as though I hit the gym the night before for the first time ever, really pushing it to the limit, and now my body is mad at me, really mad.
When I finally stood up from the bed, it was snap, crackle, and pop time, from my toes to my ankles to my knees. As I moved about, getting ready for work, my leg muscles were loosening up, but I still made an awful racket, my feet pounding the wooden floor like a troll let loose. I didn’t trip on the stairs that morning, and I didn’t fall over in my closet putting my shoes on, but neither was unusual.
A half hour later, I parked at the Anaheim Ducks arena, where I was into my second week as the Director of Corporate Sponsorships. Given the NHL lockout over player salaries and the recent cancellation of the season, there was not much to sell. Out in front of the arena, the billionaire founder of Broadcom, Henry Samueli, and his wife, Susan, soon-to-be new owners of the Ducks, were holding a breakfast pep rally for the troops.
Crossing to the buffet, I focused on my walk, trying to minimize my knees’ natural inward bend and trying to stop my feet swinging out in a half-moon with each step. Even so, some people noticed my awkward gait, and a nice young woman asked me if I had hurt my leg. “Weekend warrior,” I said, smiling but feeling uncomfortable. Nobody but my boss at the Ducks knew I had cerebral palsy. I grabbed some pancakes and bacon, sat down at a table, and introduced myself to a few people.
Samueli stepped up to the podium at the front. He was tall and lanky and wore a very nice suit. We had yet to meet, and I didn’t know what to expect. Would he offer words about keeping the faith maybe, about the next season definitely being “on,” or about staying the course because we have work to do, and so on? There was some of that, sure.
But then he said, “We have to focus on what we can control. This time we have on our hands, it’s a great opportunity to help people who need a lot more than we ever will. Go volunteer at your favorite charity, give back to your community.”
Give back, huh?
A dutiful new employee, I returned to my desk and googled “cerebral palsy” and “Orange County” and up came the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation of Orange County (UCP-OC). I rang them and said that I wanted to volunteer, and the executive director, Paul Pulver, asked me to lunch. My boss had given me a task, it sounded worthwhile and well-meaning, and given my disability, UCP-OC seemed like the right place to give back. I really didn’t think about it any more than that. By no stretch of my imagination did I think my whole life was about to change. After all, I was happy. Good. Normal.
Paul Pulver and I met at a fish restaurant by Angels Stadium. His own son had CP. I gave the broad strokes on my life and my new job 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 didn’t answer. I didn’t 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. It’s one thing to put in a few hours of volunteering; it’s another thing entirely to stand in front of a room to speak about my CP. I had never done it and had never wanted to—ever. Yet there I was.
Paul Pulver came out from the boardroom.
“Hang tight,” he said. “We’ll 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 wasn’t 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 story—part of it anyway.
On 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 why the hospital room was so quiet. I should have been crying, making a big fuss.
“Shouldn’t 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 life—white matter, neural connections, and a bunch of things that go by Latin terms, half of which I don’t understand to this day—and 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 Matt—my mother called me “Me Three”—and 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, I’d 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 my feet. Walking, I swung my legs around and rolled inward on my big toes. I lost my balance easily and fell all the time. Truth was, anything that required the use of my body from the waist down was hard to watch—and even harder to do.
In those early years, I looked like a straw with two knots tied at either end, one for my knees, the other for my head. Otherwise, I was straight and skinny, with a sunken chest and no muscles, particularly in my legs. When I was three years old, my mother told the pediatrician that I was tripping a lot. He said I was walking a little pigeon-toed and that some corrective shoes with metal toes would do the trick. These succeeded only in crushing my mother’s toes (this being southern California, everyone else was in sandals), but I continued to fall—a lot. Climbing steps, crossing the yard, walking on the beach—you name it, I fell doing it. Running and
learning to ride a bike were more exercises in catastrophe than new skills to be learned.
Broken bones came by the score. Toes, fingers, arms, ankles. I spent more time in splints, braces, and plaster casts than Wile E. Coyote. At four, I fell off a jungle gym at preschool and snapped my left arm. According to family legend, I didn’t cry, not once. Two days after the cast came off, I crashed my skateboard in the church courtyard and broke the same arm, in the same place.
While I was at the hospital, I walked toward the doctor who had set my arm the first time, and he said to my mother, “Your child doesn’t walk right.”
“Thank you for noticing,” my mother said. “You have no idea what it means for you to notice that it’s not an average walk.”
The doctor offered to assess me. After stripping down to my underwear, I was asked to walk down the hallway and back (once). His assessment?
“Bonner doesn’t have a normal walk.”
“What should we do?” my mother asked.
“No further tests required,” the doctor said. “He just walks strange.”
It was around this time I started to hate doctors.
Over the next five years, as I struggled to keep up with my brothers, at soccer, basketball, swimming, and everything else kids do, my parents assembled a team of orthopedic doctors to see what it was about my walk, the way I moved, that was not normal. One guy—and they were always guys—said I needed occupational therapy. Once a week, he had a therapist push me back and forth in a hammock, so I could learn the position of my body in space. When I was eight, another orthopedic surgeon said I was all out of alignment: the muscles in my legs were too short for my bony frame; my calves were knotted up. The solution? Both legs in plaster casts up to my knees.
I still played baseball. I mean, I could still play defense and swing the bat. The coach got me a designated runner and switched me to catcher. A real pistol I was. Afterward, my mother would have to use a brush to clean the gravel and dirt out of my plastered feet. When the doctors found that their plaster casts hadn’t worked, they put me in fiberglass ones, all the way up to my hip flexors. Nothing changed except I missed a season of soccer and swimming in the ocean.
One More Step: My Story of Living with Cerebral Palsy, Climbing Kilimanjaro, and Surviving the Hardest Race on Earth Page 1
