Susannah Scaroni - 2023 Boston Marathon Female Wheelchair Champion

I transported myself back to the starting line of the Boston Marathon this morning as I turned on the live 2023 race, six years after I stood in the same place in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. My heart rate increased, feeling anxious and excited, and my palms sweating even though I’m hundreds of miles away. I won’t forget the exact moment I started to run knowing there was no going back only forward 26.2 miles.

The first competitors of the marathon are wheelchair athletes who can complete the race in 2 hours. As their muscular arms pump with blood, spinning thin wheels on their chairs, I wonder what it is like to race in a wheelchair. I know what it feels like running for six hours from start to finish in Boston but my sports heart wonders what para-athletes experience.

Shawn Cheshire - Blind Athlete 2023 Heading to Mt. Everest

As my friend Shawn Cheshire, a blind woman and one-time Rio para-athlete bicyclist attempts to climb Mount Everest today half a globe away, I decided I want to bike with her as blind as I can be one day to experience her life as an athlete. I know what the marathoners are feeling today because I’ve run in their shoes before, but never as a para-athlete in a wheelchair competing.

Climbing Heartbreak Hill around the 20-mile marker in Boston in 2017, I ran uphill with a blind woman running with her coach on my left, and a man with steel legs and his coach on my right. The moment running alongside them seared into my soul and arose again today watching the para-athletes competing.

If I am committed to trying every sport once in my lifetime, I owe it to myself and para-athletes to try competing in their style of sport. Whether it will be with Shawn on a bike or in a wheelchair playing basketball or something else, I want to experience and write about what it is like to compete for their way.

Shawn Cheshire - Rio Olympics Para-Cyclist

I think able-bodied people like me should “walk-in” or “bike in” the races of our fellow humans. If you know someone who will show me the ropes in their para-athletic sport, let me know. It will become another golden moment for me in my pursuit to try all sports.