This is the 2nd of a series.  Enjoy

 Passion for Skiing –  Making Tracks to Paralympics Dream

 by Joshua Sundquist

Eleven years ago when I was first learning how to ski, my instructor Mark Andrews told me “the slope always looks steeper from the bottom of the mountain.”  I was ten years old and I’d only been an amputee for about six months.  My head was still bald from chemotherapy, but I really wanted to learn to ski.  It was one of the few sports I could still do now that my leg had been amputated.

Mark skied with me three times that winter and by the last session he took me down Diamond Jim, one of Massanutten’s expert trails.  It turned out he was right about the slope looking steeper from the bottom—I skied down it without a problem.

At the end of the season I raced for the first time in the Massanutten Adaptive Ski School’s Independence Cup.  I loved it.  I loved going fast, I loved the competition, I loved everything about it.  I knew that there was something out there called the Paralympics where the very best disabled skiers in the world come together to compete every four years, but I was just a beginning skier who was trying to finish his chemotherapy treatments.  The climb to the top of disabled skiing looked too steep for me to try.

But I did finish the chemotherapy treatments, and my hair grew back and my energy returned.  I kept going to Massanutten to ski with my friends during elementary and middle school.  And in my junior year of high school, I decided it was finally time to try disabled ski racing.

Filed under: Therapeutic Adventures