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Chris Waddell Living It
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© 2024 Chris Waddell
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Our greatest risk is taking no risk at all. Hall of Fame Paralympic athlete and the first "nearly unassisted" paraplegic to summit Mt Kilimanjaro in a handcycle Chris Waddell interviews people, who had been dropped into a situation that forced them to confront everything they'd thought to be true. "Experts in the Experience of Being Human," Paralympians, artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, share their fight/struggle/strategy to succeed in the face of adversity.
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I tried to match Julie’s legendary energy in this podcast. You’ll have to be the judge of whether I was successful or not. She’s famous from her team’s history changing Women’s World Cup Title in 1999. Learn how as athletes they were the best in the world, but also how they took upon themselves to ensure that the Women’s World Cup in the US would be successful and that they could fill the 92,000-seat Rose Bowl. She talks about the We versus Me mission of the team and passing that baton from one generation of players to the next as they continue to win titles, raise the level of women’s sport, and shape the world into one with equal rights for all. As she’s done since she was still a player in 1998, Julie will cover this year’s USWNT in New Zealand and Australia as they go for an unprecedented third World Cup in a row.
John was a professional rugby player and aspiring triathlete during the off-season when an eight-ton truck hit him as he trained on his bike. Medical experts set his chances at “pine or mahogany” and told the family not to expect him to make it through the day. John made it through that day. When he emerged from the coma, he asked about his bike, which had lost significance since he’d now use a wheelchair. Months of treatment and therapy eventually brought him to rebuilding his former self. As he lifted weights with his mate, his father asked, “How far can you go?” Far went well beyond pine box or mahogany. In over twelve hours of swimming, cycling, and wheelchair racing, John became the first paraplegic to meet all the cut-off times as an official finisher of the Kona Ironman. Then he swam the English Channel, the world’s busiest shipping lane, in twelve hours and fifty-five minutes. Olympic Games, Paralympic Games, a Paralympic Medal, and learning to walk again well enough to finish the original triathlon for which he was training when the truck met his bike. And there’s another challenge on the horizon.
Dan followed his brother John, six years older, into Warren Miller movies. They skied the steepest and gnarliest, but also went where the news was happening. Dan said, if it’s happening on CNN, that’s where I want to be, which meant skiing the Berlin Wall, sneaking into Lebanon, and almost dying in a storm on Europe’s tallest mountain, Russia’s Mt Elbrus. He hitchhiked with his skis strapped to his back, slept on couches, and made good on the relationships that he forged as a young teenager turning screws for the Ski Market. This boy from Boston has seen it all, skied it all and now his written it down in Thirty Years in a White Haze: Dan Egan's Story of Worldwide Adventure and the Evolution of Extreme Skiing.
Lori played Division I tennis player even though she couldn’t hear the racket hit the ball. Relying on lipreading to communicate, COVID’s masks rendered the world quiet and alone. She was the first person in the world to receive an Esteem implant (an invisible hearing device) with her Cochlear implant. Suddenly the song of the world came alive then she went deaf after ten years. She fights the fight for those who’ve been left on the outside by letting you walk in their shoes and by demonstrating how their buying power can transform your business. As the CEO of Ready or Not Media she’s changing the world.
Those of you of a certain age, will definitely remember him as Bailey from Party of Five. He has tons of acting credits in film and television and has been part of some long running shows like the aforementioned Party of Five, Everwood and now Nancy Drew. He made his directorial debut on Nancy Drew during the third season with the “Voices in the Frost” episode. He’s also a friend and a Park City resident.
It was Arthur Ashe, who made Ivan recognize the power of the athlete. Arthur had just been diagnosed with AIDS as a result of a tainted blood transfusion during heart by-pass surgery. He was dying and he could have hidden, but he asked, how can we use this? The resulting widely viewed, highly attended televised event the day before the US Open in what would eventually become Arthur Ashe Stadium put a face on the AIDS epidemic. After twenty-five years in the agent business, Ivan started Athletes for Hope to help athletes leverage their unique skills the way that Arthur had. Muhammad Ali, Mia Hamm, Jeff Gordon, Warrick Dunn, Andre Agassi, Alonzo Mourning and Jackie Joyner-Kersee remain the founding members of an organization that now numbers more than 12,000 athletes.
Laurel might enjoy her job, some of which includes colonics, which she cheers, more than anyone I know. Her passion is to heal and to help and her motivation is both personal, she had to take charge of her health after numerous surgeries, antibiotics and opioid painkillers, and it’s rooted in the historical, the traditional and the spiritual. As she says, the most common refrain from her patients is, “that makes sense.” And it does make sense on a personal, emotional and cellular level.
Storytelling consumed Stephani as a film student at USC, but one of her professors told the class that they didn’t know anything because they lacked life experience. When a car careened out of control and trapped her against her boyfriend’s car in his driveway, she lost her legs, gained life experience and turned the camera on the journey from a near death experience. That journey became a love story that led her to the top of the Paralympic skiing world.
Marc jokingly says that he’s been the one to ask the difficult questions from the time that he got kicked out of Sunday School as a kid for questioning why we as oppressed people would oppress others? Equity and agency have only grown in priority throughout his career as a Pediatric ICU Doctor and leader in the healthcare space. In addition to his role as CEO, Marc has confronted cancer twice, the second of which is incurable, but in remission. Despite or possibly in spite of job and health demands, he’s also an Ironman triathlete, the CEO, who runs bikes and swims before he goes to work.
Jill spent nine years building trust, friendship and the story of Cora’s escape from an abusive, polygamist marriage through her artwork. Snowland will be Jill’s first feature length film. Her journey has gone from shooting stills as a middle-schooler, to being a Mountain Dew girl in a series of commercials that paid her college tuition, to running the film projector in what she called a truly great job, to premiering Sister Wife at Sundance and winning the Jury Award at SXSW, to the adventure that Snowland will soon take.
Energy Sovereignty, Authoritarian Regimes, Climate Change, Green Solutions, Decarbonization, Climate-Neutral Future, Energy Poverty, Reliable Energy, US, China, Russia, EU, Developing Countries. For Retired Rear Admiral Mike Hewitt, all people deserve energy, food and clean water. In a world that has a gross inequity of power, he sees nuclear as a clean, cost efficient, consistent and convenient solution. Gone are the reactors of our past, soon to be replaced by Small Modular Reactors (SRMs). Energy Sovereignty will be a defining factor of the twenty-first century.
It’s easy to see Brad as a superhero because he’s achieved things about which most of of us just dream: Naval Academy graduate, explosives expert, breaker of a thirty year old world record, gold medalist in his second Paralympic sport, husband, father and Ivy League PhD candidate, but his success is the product of his struggles. He was about to quit the swim team at Navy to concentrate on his studies before his teammates voted him Captain for his senior season. He had to talk his way into Explosives Ordnance School because his grades weren’t competitive. Brad is a leader of men and women, who does his best to follow the example of his heroes and mentors, and with compassion and empathy. Strife and struggle have shaped who he is and he continues to seek their benefit daily.
M.C.’s professional career started, or attempted to start when he sent message to Ted Turner that he would walk from Syracuse to Atlanta to get hired by the Braves. As the process took a bad turn, M.C. slipped a dime into a pay phone and was immediately connected with the only Major League Baseball owner who would appreciate his initiative, the iconoclastic and insightful genius Bill Veeck. From the White Sox to the fledgling cable industry, to sports behemoth ESPN, to his own weekly column and to writing a speech to nominate Barack Obama, Antil learned marketing and learned that he could write. “Floor Burns” is his perfectly crafted legacy of how race, religion, changing economics, a basketball game and a highway came together to change his hometown of Syracuse, New York in 1967.
Mattochainsaw is my cousin. After dangerous years of climbing trees as an arborist/tree trimmer, he started down a different path when his wife asked him to carve a bear for the front yard. Chainsaw art–taking a piece of wood, a section of tree, or the extended stump of a felled tree and turning it into a figure and a story. Matt attends competitions, sometimes with creation time limits as short as an hour, carves images from his imagination and does commissions with chainsaw in hand and protective ear muffs
Lonnie’s father was a second generation pro wrestler–a villain, who turned kind, soft and human with his fans after the match. His uncle was a turnaround executive leading several companies from distress and treating everyone with respect. Lonnie followed his uncle’s path, working to right companies in difficulty for thirty years until he started Red Shoes Living to create the kind of culture in companies that he’d learned in his youth. Red Shoes stresses the basics that we know and seem to forget: seeing the person, being thankful, understanding that someone’s actions might be related to an unknown story, treating everyone well and putting yourself out there. You can’t help but be captivated by Lonnie.
Along with twelve buddies on a skiing trip to Val Gardena in Italy, Gregg contracted COVID before anyone knew what to make of it. He’d spend thirty-one days in a coma, waking to an entirely new world, and sixty-four days in the hospital, having to learn to swallow as well as walk. He lost all the fingers on his right hand and all to the one knuckle on his left as the drugs tried to save his internal organs, leaving the extremities vulnerable. He had MRSA, sepsis, kidney failure, liver failure, pulmonary embolisms, and burst lungs — four of them. The first major victory, walking out of the hospital, was more will than skill, then, a little more than nine months after contracting the virus, he returned to skis. The guy with a 1% chance of living felt the wind on his face and the snow below him from the top of the mountain.
While he was still in Chemotherapy, Brian convinced his parents to hit the Nordic jumps at his home in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. With each bigger jump he was more and more hooked. Then he convinced them to let him join the program. Nordic Combined became his sport when he followed his friends not realizing that it meant the pain of Cross-Country skiing, but he soon realized that he had a talent for that pain and was rewarded for being tough the way that he had been as a little kid having to get his blood drawn. That joy and toughness led to two Olympic and five World Championship Teams. Now, he works with one of the preeminent knee clinics in the world, giving so many others an opportunity to live fully.
Odessa is a Hall of Fame Running Back and the President of Emtrain, a revolutionary eLearning and analytics company that goes beyond compliance to create inclusive workplaces. It’s all of that and a movement to help others find the voice that she shares so beautifully. It’s not about clamoring for equality, but earning equity. It’s about breaking the glass ceiling and empowering others to break the next one. OJ shares so naturally what it means to be a human on a journey with a very distinct why.
I kept Steve’s title lowercase because he usually does and because he doesn’t take himself too seriously, even though he’s undertaking the serious work of brightening the day of children, often with long term stays in the hospital. Steve cashed the $8 check for his first published cartoon, he met his hero and mentor Dr Seuss by arriving at his door mostly unannounced, he dressed up with girlfriend and then wife Diana Golden, the most influential adaptive skier in US history, for her chemotherapy sessions, and brought a city together with one kind gesture when he shined his bike light toward the hospital to say that he’d be thinking of a soon to be discharged patient. The patient flicked his room light in response.
Kara is one of the most respected, beloved and outspoken members of the running community. She was a historic performer and continues as a huge proponent of clean racing both with regard to performance enhancing drugs and technology. With Olympic, Track and Marathon television analysis, she’s a voice of running while also battling Repetitive Exercise Dystonia to continue to enjoy the sport she loves so much.
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