Humanoid Profiles
Story by Gary Greenberg
Photo by Diane Bradford
Marathon Man
“That’s me with my father,” Paul Rockwell says,
pointing to a black and white photo hanging
on his bedroom wall. He laughs. “Check out my Forrest Gump braces.”
Ah yes, it was so easy for Forrest Gump. One
moment he was crippled, and the next he was
running, faster and faster, until he ran right out of his leg braces.
It was a mystical, magical
transformation. Pure Hollywood.
The script 35-year-old Paul Rockwell has had
to follow through reality hasn’t been so
smooth. Born with cerebral palsy, he’s been shackled to crutches for
life. But like Forrest Gump,
Paul Rockwell has managed to shed his braces. And like Forrest, Paul
runs. With splayed crutches
swinging and twisted legs hopping along, he runs the streets of Stuart,
Fla., up to nine miles at a clip.
In a storyline nearly as improbable as Forrest Gump’s, Paul Rockwell
has become a marathon
runner.
“Cerebral palsy is amazing because it affects everyone
differently,” he says. “I’m lucky that
mine is limited to my legs. It hasn’t even stopped me from running.
I count my blessings every day.”
A Cambridge, Mass., native, Paul got the idea to
run the famed Boston Marathon a few years
ago and set out to accomplish the goal in a quixotic quest that would
change his life. But it wasn’t
really that much of a stretch for the lifelong sports junkie.
“All I remember from my youth is playing sports,”
he explains. “I built a baseball field in my
backyard long before Kevin Costner did it in the movies. And I played
four-on-four football with my
friends. I was always the quarterback…” he pauses for effect “…because
I had the best arm.”
In 1999, he began training for marathons, a 26-mile
race that remains one of the most
grueling tests in all of sports. In October of that year, he ran the
Chicago Marathon to qualify for
Boston. And the following April, he completed his Holy Grail, the Boston
Marathon, in just over
seven and a half hours.
Along with physical fitness and mental strength,
his accomplishments gained him some media
exposure, some fans and a very unexpected fringe benefit. Paul used
his newfound notoriety to raise
$1,000 for United Cerebral Palsy, and when charity worker Lauren Spalding
was sent to pick up the
money, she instantly became smitten with him. In happily-ever-after
fashion, they were married last
May.
Paul ran Boston again in 2001, but had to drop out
in the thirteenth mile after pulling a
muscle. Now, wanting his 26-year-old wife, Lauren, to see him finish
a race, he’s training to take on
the Chicago Marathon again.
“Most of what I use in running is my upper body,
so I’ve been concentrating on weight
training these days,” he notes. The strength it takes shows in the
corded muscles of his arms as well
as the number of crutches he goes through.
“They tend to break in half,” he says. “But one
of the first things you learn when you’re
disabled is to fall well because you’re going to be doing it all your
life. My first therapist told me that
after she pulled my crutch out from under me. She said, ‘You have to
make gravity your friend.’”
For the most part, Paul has made gravity his friend.
And he’s made a lot of other friends
through his proud, determined, never-say-never attitude towards life
despite being dealt what most
people would consider a bum hand. In fact, when asked how he’d feel
if he could be miraculously
cured, he shrugs as though he could take it or leave it.
“Sometimes people come up to me and say they’ll
pray for me to be healed,” he confides. “I
tell them I’m made in God’s image, so He must have crutches, too. I’m
happy with the way I am.”
That may be a difficult concept for able-bodied
people to accept. To watch the trouble Paul
has merely walking from the living room to the kitchen, his strong
upper body continually teetering
on mutinous legs, every ungainly step looking tortured as he struggles
to remain on good terms with
gravity…it’s enough to send the pity meter off the high end of the
scale.
But Paul neither wants nor expects your pity. And
when he’s out running on the street, you
see that there is grace to his stride, a fluidness born out of the
regularity of his movement as he
swings on the crutches, churning up mile after mile at a slow, steady
pace.
Like Forrest Gump, Paul Rockwell has run right out
of his braces and into the heart of
anyone with a heart. And he’s proven beyond a doubt that you don’t
have to be able-bodied to be a
winner in the human race.