Team Agar
Some people who see me walk today, may think I have been able to walk for a long time. The reality is it requires a lot of hard work for me to put one foot in front of the other. My muscles like to do something different than what my brain is telling them to do! Cerebral palsy has a tendency to do that.
I wasn’t always an athlete. I was what I soon learned people liked to call disabled. Born with cerebral palsy, my shot at being an athlete was about as distant as it could have been. But sports were never out of my life. Thanks to my Dad’s time playing as a relief pitcher for the Detroit Tigers minor league organization, soon my passion for competing took shape as well.
My parents had a choice, they could have told me when I was little that I would never be the next Peyton Manning or Steve Yzerman, that I was disabled and destined for a wheelchair. They could have told me that my best shot was just to be able to feed myself and talk, as the doctors told them. But they didn’t. They chose, as they continue to do, to give me a shot, to believe in me. They told me that anything was possible with God. If I wanted to be an athlete the only thing stopping me was the doubt in my mind that I couldn’t. That's why I decided to train to walk the last mile in a race my dad had pushed me in before - the St Patrick Festival 5K.
I knew this first hand how hard I was going to have to work. My dad had never run a 5K before. When he pushed me in our first race, we were passed by an 80-year old power walker, but we loved it and kept at it. We now have completed hundreds of races together even competing in the most brutal one-day endurance event in the world -- the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii.
