Whatever this adventure, my new foundation would have to be a part of it. With the help of the documentary, I saw my foundation grow and flourish. I wanted to make sure that this next adventure would succeed, but I also wanted to start making a difference immediately—not just in California, but around the world.
In May 2010, I found myself running at full tilt through the Amsterdam airport. Thanks to the fact that the pilot on my late plane out of LAX had radioed ahead, I had been given a chance to make the Arusha flight. It was a sign, I convinced myself, that this journey was meant for great things. Breathless, I rushed onto the plane and took my seat next to Dr. Afshin Aminian. After a side trip to Paris to perform some pediatric surgeries, Afshin was accompanying me on my first mission with the OM Foundation.
Since returning from Kilimanjaro, I had grown closer to this tall, tell-it-like-it-is doctor who was the director of the Children’s Orthopedic Center at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Born in Iran, Afshin attended boarding school in Switzerland and then graduated from Northwestern. He had first studied electrical engineering, but he found that painfully boring and isolating. An adviser suggested that he focus on biomedical engineering, where he could design artificial kidneys, hearts, and the like. As part of the program, he worked in a rehabilitation institute in Chicago and found that he preferred meeting with the patients who needed prosthetics rather than sitting up in the lab on the top floor making their new limbs. The director suggested medical school, and several years later Afshin was a top pediatric orthopedic surgeon. When I launched my foundation, I asked him to be on the board and to be our medical director. He jumped in with both feet.
My emotional connection to Tanzania from the climb made it an obvious choice for our first work outside the United States. When we arrived in Arusha that night, two young Tanzanians welcomed us at the airport, placing garlands of flowers around our necks. They were from a nonprofit relief organization that helped impoverished, sick, and orphaned children in Tanzania. They shook our hands vigorously and ushered us out to a waiting van.
We drove away from Arusha toward Mt. Kilimanjaro along a long dark highway. At last we pulled off onto a side road and then stopped in front of the metal gates. A guard with a machete on his hip opened the gates, and we drove inside the compound of buildings that make up the orphanage. A friend who had visited Tanzania the year before had suggested this organization to me, and Afshin and I had come in order to organize medical treatment for the children, including potential surgeries, and also to assess the possibility of contributing funds for a treatment center.
Because of dueling schedules, we only had forty-eight hours before we needed to return to the airport. It was late, and most of the lights were out in the cluster of buildings. Nevertheless, a number of children and adults were standing about waiting for our arrival. Many of them had come from miles away to be examined by Afshin.
A part of me wanted to get going straightaway, but we were advised against it. They said that the next day would be very busy and that it was time for bed. They led us to a room with two short, narrow beds surrounded with mosquito netting. Both of us were so tall that our feet dangled over the ends of the beds, but it didn’t matter. We both conked out in minutes.
In the morning, I woke up to the sound of giggles and children’s voices. I emerged from my room to see in the distance the snowy peaks of Kilimanjaro, which I had climbed a year and a half earlier. As I walked through the compound, kids of every age peered out at me above windowsills and from around corners and trees. I waved and smiled. Some waved back; others shyly ducked for cover. They were as curious about me as I was eager to get to know them.
At the end of the property, I came to an open field on which one day my foundation might build a center. It was a Field of Dreams moment—I imagined its walls and roof rising and the children crossing toward it to get the help they needed.
Later, Afshin and I headed over to the kitchen for breakfast. The organization’s leaders told us a few of the children’s stories. Some had been locked in cages and closets before they came to the orphanage. Some had been abandoned at her doorstep, others left to fend for themselves in the wild. One had been burned to scare the demons out of her. Another, an albino, had been saved from witch doctors who wanted to sever her limbs and sell them as “magic.” Many were merely too much of a burden for their parents, whether because they had AIDS or because they cost too much to feed. The conversation was sobering, but it also fired me up to get started.
Afshin set up his exam line under a shady tree, and a score of people gathered. They had come from the neighboring villages, some many miles away. The first patient, a woman, had a deformed foot that Afshin said could be quickly corrected with a special shoe. A translator conveyed this to the woman. Afshin made a note on a pad, and then he was on to the next patient.
Then a man, short as a jockey, approached. His threadbare, dirty clothes looked as if they had been slowly eaten by moths over the course of two decades. In his arms he carried his fourteen-year-old daughter, who was wearing a brand-new pink dress. Her father set her down on the ground a few feet away from us, and she came the rest of the way herself, walking on her knees. It was such a heartbreaking moment that I had to take a seat on the bench. We were introduced to Juliana, and then Afshin took over.
Sitting down next to her, he asked quietly if he could lift up her dress over her knees to examine her legs. Her eyes shifted uneasily, and her hands shook. Nonetheless, she bravely nodded, giving Afshin permission. He examined her lower body, which was in a bad way. One foot grew out the back of her hamstring, just above the knee, and her other leg was bent 90 degrees inward. Afshin asked Juliana and her father a bunch of questions. Every answer was a simple yes or no, rarely delivered with any emotion and never with any detail. From what I understood, Juliana had been using her knees to walk all her life, and her father had carried her on his back for two days “across the bush” to get here.
The orphanage’s director, who was watching over the examination, stepped in and asked Juliana if she wanted to live there. She looked to her father, but said nothing. The director then asked the father if he wanted Juliana to live there. After a moment, he said yes. The director then asked Juliana again. She said yes, staring at the ground. The father spit on his hand, then shook the director’s. Done. That quickly. In five minutes—less, probably—a child had been given over into the care of another. The conversation left me so overwrought that I had to walk away and catch my breath. No doubt Juliana’s father thought that this was his daughter’s best chance in life, but to relinquish your child. . . . It was too much for me, particularly since I realized this happened many, many times every month.
After more examinations, we took a break and were given a tour of the whole compound. Some of the children looked perfectly healthy, though their eyes betrayed psychological wounds. Others were pretty severely sick or disabled, lying on mats or shuffling across the room using chairs for balance. One child had burn scars all over her body. I had mixed emotions. The tragedy was heart-wrenching, but then again these children were likely in a better place now than where they had come from.
For the rest of the morning, I played with the children or sat beside Afshin while he performed his exams. He amazed me. He never hesitated as he talked with the patients in line about their sufferings. The younger ones he held as though they were his own children. He calmly gave his diagnosis and then made his notes before moving on to the next patient.
After the clinic, we drove to a remote town called Machame, located in the opposite direction from Arusha. Afshin wanted to check out whether the hospital there had the facilities he needed to perform the surgeries he wanted to do. Juliana came along with us to have X-rays taken of her legs. She was silent and quiet in the back of the van. Afshin and the hospital’s head doctor had a long conversation, but it was clear that any surgeries as complicated as the one Juliana needed would require levels of postoperative care that were beyond what
she could easily get in Tanzania. We returned to the orphanage, had dinner by lantern light, and hit the sack early.
The next day, we got up before dawn. Outside the kitchen, I passed Juliana’s father, who had been given a fresh set of clothes. He had spent the night on the floor and was getting ready to head back to his village. Afshin and I piled into the van and set out for Miryani, a tanzanite-mining town described to us as “the end of hell.” Even the police, the orphanage’s director said, dared not go there. They ran another orphanage in the town and operated a couple of food dispensaries. A few hours later, we arrived at a ragtag collection of huts on dirt streets. The director advised us to keep our eyes to ourselves until we were safe inside the walls of the food kitchen and to not venture away from that building. We would be leaving before dark, no arguments. Seeing the tough-looking bunch who stared at us as we approached, I quickly understood why.
Even given the town’s tough reputation, I was not prepared for the line of half-starved children, barefoot and in rags, who gathered for food. One boy, a seven-year-old, came to the front and took away three bowls of food. He huddled down next to two younger children, who must have been his sister and brother. Neither of them was older than three. He fed them both before shoveling his own food into his mouth as if it was the last meal he would ever have. Afshin and I couldn’t help but watch them. The misery of the scene was acute, and we were both brought to tears. They were probably the kids of a miner killed while burrowing into the earth for tanzanite or wasted away by the scourge of AIDS. Either way, I knew I would never forget that little boy and his two siblings; the sight of them was burned deep inside me.
We headed back to the Miryani orphanage and met some albino children who had run away from home. While we were there, two older men carrying a young child arrived at the gate. They were a tribal elder and the chief of a nearby village, and they wanted to hand over the girl to the orphanage. No mention was made of her parents. Afshin examined her. It was clear from her movements that she likely had cerebral palsy. The director suggested we take her back to the main orphanage. So they had welcomed two children in as many days.
As planned, we headed back before dark. Almost as soon as we returned, we had to leave for the airport. There was no doubt that the OM Foundation wanted to build a center for the disabled children or that we would be bringing Juliana to the States for her surgery (and perhaps others too).
While we waited to board our plane, Afshin and I sat across from each other in the airport restaurant, trying to wrap our heads around everything we had witnessed in the past two days. We talked a lot about our next steps in Tanzania and how much we could do. Afshin wanted to take his whole team there each year to do surgeries. We also wanted to train doctors and empower others in Tanzania to help their own people. So much needed to be done.
On our journey back, I also thought a lot about the children I had met, especially Juliana. The memory of her first crossing toward Afshin on her knees almost brought tears to my eyes. Yet the more I considered the moment, the more I was struck by how much bravery and resilience she showed. Here was a young girl who took the worst that life had given her and made do with it the best way she could. There was a lesson there that I needed to learn for myself, and I was more eager than ever to begin.
In fall 2010, two years after reaching Uhuru Peak, I finally began to feel well enough physically to think about moving ahead with plans for my next mountain. I tried working out, seeing how my body handled short jogs along the coast and time at the gym. All was good.
The next adventure was not literally about picking another actual mountain. Nobody knew I had already been thinking about my next project, so almost everyone was ready with helpful suggestions. A favorite was Everest. To that, my answer was always an instant no. It would have been a death sentence, and I had no interest in being stuck on the side of a mountain freezing cold and starved of oxygen ever again.
Since the documentary premiere, however, I had considered a bunch of other crazy ideas: swimming across the English Channel, an ultradistance run of 50 miles or more, Forrest Gumping my way across the United States—something that tested me as never before.
The Ironman triathlon in Kona.
No apple needed to fall on my head to make me arrive at the idea. A triathlon was always in the running, but the Kona Ironman was the only one that kept coming back to me. As kids, my brother Matt and I used to sit in front of the TV for hours every year watching the world’s greatest triathlon on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. I could recite the promo by heart: “The thrill of victory . . . the agony of defeat.” We oohed and aahed and gasped as racers chopped through the crystal-blue waters, struggled by bike across the barren volcanic tundra, and stumbled, fell, and at times crawled across the finish line. In particular, the story of the Hoyt men fascinated me. Seeing Dick Hoyt tow and push his son, Rick, who had cerebral palsy, was always an arrow to the heart. Before Kilimanjaro, I had even sent the Hoyts a note about my adventure, saying that as a kid they had inspired me to push myself. They sent back a signed picture with their tagline: “Yes, you can.”
The more I thought about the Kona Ironman, the greater sense it made. An Ironman triathlon was the pinnacle of endurance events: a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a marathon run. Nothing could be tougher on the body. The Kona Ironman, otherwise known as the Ironman World Championship, was the pinnacle of the sport. The best of the best competed in the race, and it was a brutal trial of will, body, and heart. A real monster, and the perfect fun-house mirror.
Still feeling good at the start of 2011, I visited Dr. Millhouse. I didn’t tell him about the Ironman, but said that I was tired of lying around like a blob and wanted to get exercising again. He examined me, said that everything looked good, and advised me to ramp up my efforts gradually; if I listened to what my body was telling me, I’d be fine. I wonder if he would have said the same if I had told him the truth.
By chance, I was having lunch with some folks at Oakley that same day. (Oakley, a sports eyewear and performance gear maker, had donated equipment for my Kilimanjaro climb, and the CEO, Colin Baden, had turned the screening of the documentary into a big event at its global headquarters.) Somewhere during the usual chit-chat, they asked me how I was feeling.
“Funny,” I said, “my doctor just cleared me to exercise.”
“What’s next then?” Dane Howell asked. Howell worked in Oakley’s military division, supplying all kinds of gear to the United States military, including Special Forces, and allies around the world. His nickname was “Guns” because of his ripped arms, and he was big: six foot seven, 240 pounds.
“Do you know any triathletes?” I asked.
“Don’t even tell me you’re thinking about doing Ironman!” Dane said.
“Well . . .” I sheepishly smiled, jumping in farther than I had planned to.
“You’re crazy,” said Erick Poston, Dane’s boss at the time and a former motocross champion who knew crazy from crazy. Then he asked, “You know who works for Oakley?”
I shook my head.
“Greg Welch.”
“The Ironman champion, dude,” Dane added.
“I know. He’s an absolute beast,” I replied.
“I’ll go see him and give him your documentary,” Poston promised.
Leaving lunch, I felt overwhelmed. Until that point, Ironman was still only an idea, one that I would commit to only if it were physically possible for me to do it—and I didn’t know that yet. Now I was announcing my intentions about competing at the Kona Ironman—and potentially meeting Greg Welch to talk about them.
The Greg Welch. By far one of the most accomplished Ironman triathletes in history, the Australian was once known as the “world’s fittest man.” In the early 1990s, he was the dominant triathlete, winning race after race, including the Ironman World Championship at Kona in 1994. “Sir Plucky” was his nickname, for his madman will and persistence. A couple of miles into the swim leg of the 1999 championship, Welc
h grew light-headed and short of breath, his heart beating like mad. He stopped for five minutes, thinking he was having an asthma attack. Unwilling to quit, he forged ahead. Over the course of the race, through the bike ride and run, he had fifteen separate such episodes, yet still managed to finish in eleventh place. It was only afterward that he learned his “asthma attacks” were actually heart attacks caused by ventricular tachycardia, a condition that subsequently forced him from the sport. Welch was a legend among triathletes, and besides his gig at Oakley he still announced many of the key triathlons, including the World Championship every year. Some of this I knew from watching Welch compete. The rest I researched, hoping that I might get to meet him.
A couple of weeks after my impromptu declaration to the folks at Oakley, I was sitting in a booth at Wahoo’s, a Mexican restaurant near Oakley headquarters, waiting for Welch to arrive. I was nervous and had a laundry list of questions in my notebook. Welch entered, a short fireplug of a man, his face tanned and creased from years in the sun. What a presence, I thought, as he waved at a few people in the restaurant before shaking my hand vigorously and giving me a “Howdy, mate” with a wide grin. With all that he had done, he sat down unpretentiously.
I thanked him for meeting me, and he said he was impressed with my documentary, which Erik Poston had given him. Then we huddled over the table and got to it. I peppered him with my list: How long would I need to train? How do I ramp up? What kind of races would I need to do in advance of the World Championship? How much did he know about cerebral palsy? What impact would the CP have? Did he think it was possible?
Welch was straight up from the start. “Finishing will be very hard,” he said, with a short laugh. “It’s much more than simply running, biking, and swimming.”
“Can I do it?” I asked.
“You don’t know how many able-bodied people try to do this. There are so many unknowns, and many people underestimate what it takes to get there and what it takes to finish the race. Some of the best athletes in the world struggle even to finish at Kona.”
One More Step: My Story of Living with Cerebral Palsy, Climbing Kilimanjaro, and Surviving the Hardest Race on Earth Page 13
