Sarah's Peak-to-Peak Pedal Training Update

I am three weeks into my training for my upcoming 335 mile bike ride to raise money for the US Adaptive Recreation Center, the Peak-To-Peak Pedal. It's going pretty well. I've been hitting the bike at the gym and also the weight room. I haven't lost any weight yet, but I'm hoping it's because I am adding muscle. You know how people always say that exercise gives you loads of energy, but then you just ignore them because you're too tired to get off the couch? Yes, well, apparently it's true. I have way more energy since I started working out last month! It's amazing. Energy to clean the house, cook, write, and make stuff. I'm picking up my road bike tomorrow and after I get it worked on, I should be ready to hit the road next week.

I'm also 13% of the way to my fundraising goal. Yay! If you would like to help me support USARC, please click here! Again, if you live in the LA area, I will bake you delicious treats if you make a donation to USARC. I cannot overemphasize the deliciousness here!

The other aspect of the ride is definitely psychological! Can I get into shape to finish it? Will it be so hard that I will cry? This weekend I went to see the AIDS/Lifecycle (a charity bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles) ride into LA. 2500 cyclists ride over 500 miles to raise over 12 million dollars! HIV-positive riders are also prominent in the ride. The closing ceremonies with all the riders that I watched really inspired me. My friend Cyclist J completed the ride so we came to cheer him. Everyone there did so much hard work which was well worth it. Hopefully I can do the same in my ride!

Inspiring-lyrics-heard-on-the-Ipod-at-the-gym Of The Week:

how come I can pick my friends
but not my enemies
what is it about me that offends
what is it about me
'cause you know I'm only five foot two
and I'm giggly wiggly
tell me again, what did I do
why are you scared of me
I fight with love
and I laugh with rage
you've gotta live light enough
to see the humour
and long enough to see some change

I think shy is boring
I think depressed is too
I think pretty is nice
but I'd rather see something new
all these plastic people
got their plastic surgery
but we got a big big beautiful
we got it for free
who you gonna be
if you can't be yourself
you can't get it from t.v.
you can't force it on
anybody else
-"Pick yer nose" by Ani Difranco

Resources for Including People With Developmental Disabilities in Religion: Adam's Pew Project

I wanted to share a site with lots of links to resources for including people with developmental disabilities in religion. Earlier I wrote about Adam Race, an autistic boy whose church obtained a restraining order to prevent him from attending Mass due to his autism-related behavior. Adam's family has created a website called Project Adam's Pew. The website includes this page of great resources. Many of the links are specific to Catholicism, but there are others for Christianity, Judaism, and general spirituality as well.
Publish Post

People With Disabilities In the Google Graphic Today!

Wow! Today Google's Homepage is celebrating the birth of Diego Velasquez with a special Google logo containing his painting "Las Meninas" (The Ladies-in-Waiting). It'll only be there for a day, so I have posted a copy above. Velasquez is one of my favorite painters, so pardon me while I geek out. Here's the painting, so you can see it a little closer:

There are all sorts of awesome things about this painting which I suggest you read about. I've seen it in real life at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain. It's basically a painting of five-year-old La Infanta Margarita, daughter of King Philip IV of Spain (being a princess isn't all it's cracked up to be: forced to marry a man who was both her maternal uncle and paternal cousin, Margarita had six children and died at the tender age of twenty-one).

Anyway, to the far right of the painting you will see two enanos (dwarfs), the German Maria Barbola (who is an achondroplasia dwarf) and the Italian Nicolas Pertusato. At that time in history, dwarfs were frequently forced to be a part of the royal court, serving as a jester or other entertainment due to their appearance. In this article I found the following quote:

...modern conceptions of dignity of merit are understood in terms of a struggle to excel in particular activities, and thus to overcome the risk of failure. More radically, Velázquez' portraits of dwarfs and the mentally disabled are argued to be expressive of dignity, not by finding a positive representation of the sitter's dignity, or to find scales of activities by which they can be positively assessed, but rather by grounding their dignity, negatively, in a protest against indignity and humiliation.

Through his art, Velasquez was lobbying for disability rights centuries before the movement really took off. According to this interesting PBS piece about dwarfs in art, Velasquez was the first to paint subjects with disabilities with the same warmth and humanity used for his royal subjects-other painters created disabled subjects "with a cold detachment that reflected the 16th and 17th century attitude toward the handicapped."

Velasquez painted more than ten dwarfs during his career, as well as subjects with developmental disabilities. To me, the beauty in his paintings really lies within the eyes. I'll share two more beautiful portraits with you:

Don Sebastian de Morra (an achondroplasia dwarf)


Francisco Lezcano (a young boy with dwarfism and a developmental disability)

I will leave you with a link to the beautiful paintings and photography of Tim Lowly. One of Mr. Lowly's main subjects is his daughter Temma, a young woman with a severe anoxic brain injury. His work is very powerful and his images will stay with you.

Dave has declared today Harry and Kevin Day! Go find out why. Now celebrate!

Beijing Offends Everyone With Guide for Olympics Staff

I just noticed this story about China's extremely backwards attitudes towards people with disabilities. A guide went out to one hundred thousand Olympic Volunteers for this year's Summer Games. In the section titled, "Skills for helping the disabled," China's Olympic Committee brings us such gems as:

Some physically disabled are isolated, unsocial, and introspective. They can be stubborn and controlling; they may be sensitive and struggle with trust issues. Sometimes they are overly protective of themselves, especially if called “crippled” or “paralysed...

When you make eye contact, do not fuss or show unusual curiosity. Never stare at their disfigurement. A patronising or condescending attitude will be easily sensed, even for a brain-damaged patient.

Often the optically disabled are introverted. They seldom show strong emotions.

This is really offensive. I want to hope that this is just a bad translation, but I don't think that's it. The Times UK article points out that, even though there are eighty million people in China who have disabilities, discrimination against them is firmly embedded in modern Chinese culture. "The Communist Party’s desire for a healthy nation, characterised by the one-child policy, fostered deep prejudices that extended to forced sterilisations, bans on marriages between disabled people and abortions of abnormal foetuses."

After complaints from loads of disability rights groups, the manual is being revised to be less horrible. Let's hope the Paralympic Athletes get the warm welcome they deserve in Beijing, instead of being greeted by these type of archaic and offensive attitudes.

In brighter news, Paralympian Cheri Blauwet was recently featured in a Visa commercial on NBC prime time. I will try to hunt it down on YouTube to post it up here. Visa will also feature other Paralympians in their commercials as we approach the summer games.

Also, this guy who has cerebral palsy is walking 830 miles across Michigan to raise money for United Cerebral Palsy. On stilts. I wonder if the three-foot stilts make it easier to cover ground on his trek. I'm guessing not. And his pants bill must be through the roof!

Image: Shaho Qadir finishes the Great North Run half-marathon in style. A man in athletic attire and a bike helmet walks on his hands on a road. He is missing both legs just below the knee. Behind him in the distance, a man is finishing in a racing wheelchair.

Abilities Expo Anaheim 2008

This Sunday, someone invited me to the Abilities Expo in Anaheim. There was lots of interesting stuff. I also went to a presentation by Craig Kennedy, of Access Anything. I took a couple of pictures.

The absolute coolest technology I saw while I was there belonged to a little girl, about ten years old, in a wheelchair. She was a double amputee and she had on two racing blade prosthetic legs for running (like Oscar Pistorius). (I think she was in a wheelchair because, while the blades are perfect for sprinting, I believe they are very difficult to walk in.) Style-wise, she had him beaten by miles though, because the sockets of her prosthetics were Hello Kitty-themed. Yes, that's right, Hello Kitty prosthetic legs for racing. I didn't take a picture because I didn't want to bother her, but rest assured that she was awesome. Her competitors on the track probably fall over in the starting blocks, hit by the forceful waves of little-girl-coolness coming off of her. I wonder if she will be eligible to qualify for the 2016 Olympics...Pistorius is breaking ground for kids like her this year.
My favorite pics:

For those of you who are concerned that your wheelchair doesn't match your chopper, I present this beauty, in black with neon green flames.


And for those of you concerned that your motorcycle and sidecar don't match your wheelchair and your electric guitar, "Colours Wheelchair" has got you covered.


This kid is trying to think of a way to ask his mom to buy him his very own iBot Wheelchair. Must...have...awesome...chair...please...mom...buy me one!

Craig Kennedy had lots of interesting things to say about adaptive recreation. First, he said that you can't do adaptive sports without "PVC pipe and duct tape." Totally true. Adaptive sports equipment is sometimes expensive, hand-engineered, and built by hand to high specifications. Even so, adapting that equipment to the particular size and shape of a person can still be a challenge--duct tape is the quickest way to jury-rig a solution for an individual. One quick example: a bi-skier with lots of arm strength but poor hand grip strength could have their hands in their mittens duct-taped onto their outriggers in a gripping position, so they don't have to struggle with a grip that they can't maintain by themselves.

Mr. Kennedy talked about some interesting things I hadn't heard of before, like adaptive wakeboarding and this wheelchair-accessible tent. The crowd at his talk was small, but I could feel that they were getting really enthusiastic about adaptive sports as he talked. When the talk ended, I had to sneak over to a young man sitting across from me named John to tell him about USARC's skiing program and summer program. He had never heard of it and he looked excited, so maybe I'll see him on the slopes next year! I'll leave you with my favorite quote from his talk:

Every sport out there has been adapted for people with disabilities. The last thing we will adapt will be people's attitudes-about what we can do, what we are capable of doing.

Images: 1. A snazzy chopper motorcycle with a manual wheelchair hooked onto the back of it. 2. A black motorcycle with orange flames has a sidecar containing a manual wheelchair with a leopard print seat. On the ground beside it is a matching electric guitar. 3. A little boy in a baseball cap is standing and staring up in awe at a man in an iBot, a wheelchair that raises up on two wheels. The man is leaning down and chatting to the boy's mother. A banner in the background reads: 'Go where you want to go...Do what you want to do.'