About a week before leaving the spinal unit, Cresswell attended the Spine Games at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, which is for patients with spinal injuries who are still in hospital or within a year of the accident, and is an opportunity to try different sports over four days.
You name it, she tried it.
“I hit six out of six targets and won archery out of 110 people,” he says.
“It was a great springboard to come home. And I think I held on to that when I came home initially because the first half was so difficult at home.”
He left the hospital on October 8 and in December had begun running in a wheelchair, moving on to run 10 kilometers and a half marathon, as well as playing tennis and wheelchair basketball.
The problem was that she didn’t love them.
“I was worried that I would never find a sport I wanted to put all my energy into,” he says. “I think I knew that horses were my hobby that became my sport, my career and my lifestyle, so I didn’t know if it would be possible to find something like that.”
Go paracanoe.
Cresswell had spoken to Olympic canoeing athlete Deborah Kerr at an event organized by the Women’s Sport Trust charity, who had told her to “give it a try”.
He did so on December 23 of last year. Winter “was not the time to take up a water sport” and she “wasn’t a natural.”
“My coach was too scared to let me off the bench in case I tipped over,” he laughs. “And that probably stuck, I don’t think I left the bank for about a month.”
A single test session turned into twice a week and finally five times a week in the water. Four-hour training sessions, plus gym work three days a week.
One of the biggest challenges has been staying upright.
“I have no response from any part of my body if I lose my balance,” he explains. “So I’m tied to a seat because I don’t have any central function, but I can’t actually feel that seat. So I basically feel like I’m floating.
“So the only thing I have to know if I’ve lost my balance is my head and my eyes. So it took me a while to start perfecting it and they always say that deaf people hear better than anyone else, right? And I think it’s a little bit the same.
“It’s like I’ve now adapted to how to balance without using the rest of my body. But I would say the balance aspect is a big part of it along with the technical and constant skill-based things that need to be improved.”
It is the technical aspect that he believes has similarities to horse riding and that is why he believes he enjoys it so much.
His progress has been rapid, by anyone’s standards. Yours is no less important.
“The World Championship was definitely not the plan. After a while it was a quiet goal that, if I had the time, I could go to,” says Cresswell, who in addition to training also works with the media.
“The time I needed to do it was, I think, one minute 26 seconds. And anyway, now I’m at one minute 18. So I’ve gone overboard on that, which has just been through repetition, practice and finding new ways to do things.”
She has been selected to represent Great Britain at this month’s World Canoe Sprint and Para-Canoe Championships in Poznan, Poland.
Having raced only once before in the UK, his goals are modest.
“Honestly, stay awake and get over the start-finish line,” he says, explaining that he flipped before the start of a race he was supposed to run in April.
Rather, it is about obtaining an international classification, which involves a series of medical tests to assess an athlete’s impairment and demonstrate which part of their body they can use when rowing, so they can be eligible to earn points in events that can lead to qualification for the 2028 Paralympic Games in Los Angeles.
Could he have imagined this when he was in the hospital?
“I certainly wouldn’t have imagined I was going to paracanoe; I didn’t even know [that] It was a sport when I was in the hospital,” says Cresswell, who will compete in VL1 (a canoe with a support float) and KL1 (kayak).
“But to be honest, I think what’s actually craziest in my head is that I couldn’t even imagine January doing this.”
Source link
