Wheelchair racing - first two sessions

Thanks to the good folk at Cambridge and Coleridge Athletic Club, supported by Sport England, I and a group of other full- and part-time wheelchair users have been having a go at wheelchair racing on our Monday evenings. The first week was wet and the second week was freezing but that hasn't dampened our enthusiasm! Here's how we've been getting on...

David Weir - inspiration!

Week One
We started off by learning a bit about the sport from two current wheelchair racers at Cambridge and Coleridge. It turns out that there's a lot more to it than just sitting in a different-shaped wheelchair and pushing yourself along. First off, there are two main types of chair for non-amputees like us - sitting and kneeling. One of the girls demonstrating had a kneeling chair, but the rest of us opted for the sitting position, which is more comfortable if you have any feeling in your legs - however sporadic or weak.

The first difficulty with it is getting into the chair. It's quite a tight squeeze! I'm in the smallest type of chair the club has and it's definitely not dignified getting in or out, especially given that my legs are really shaky and it's hard to poke my feet through the right bit and sit down with enough force to get my bum in the seat. Unlike a normal wheelchair, which is just a seat on wheels, these are designed so that your bum sort of sinks into a pouch. You then lean right forwards, with your feet up on a little foot rest, and get strapped in at the back, so that you can't really sit up properly.

A picture speaks a thousand words!

We also got introduced to the special gloves you have to wear. I think it is fair to say that I am not a fan of the gloves. Most of us have struggled to get them on, and it's especially tough to pull them on when you don't have fantastic strength in your arms/hands. Once you've got one on, it's impossible to do anything with that hand, so they have to be done after you're in the chair and have your helmet on. Also, you can't use a gloved hand to put the other glove on, so teeth are very helpful - fortunately this is something I've also used for riding gloves for a long time...

The idea is that you fold your fingers down and strap them in, out of harm's way (getting caught in the spokes wouldn't be great). The gloves also give you a firm surface to push against. However, they take a lot of getting used to and at the moment I just find them really uncomfortable. Moan moan moan! I'll get used to them soon.

Little fingers go in the flexible leather bit and fold into the palm, then the other three fingers in the harder section fold in and the strap comes round and fastens around the hand and over the thumb.

Pushing a racing wheelchair is pretty different to pushing a normal one. Part of this is the position you're in - in a racing chair, your body is much lower to the ground, especially the shoulders. In a normal wheelchair, you grasp the push rims around the edge of each wheelchair between your hands, starting at about 10 o'clock (or more if you're super flexible :D). In a racing chair, you don't 'grasp' at all, you just push, and you start at 1 o'clock, but aim to finish the stroke with the arms much lower around the wheel. The main thing I'm struggling to get right at the moment is the hand angle - but hopefully that will come with practice.

Me in action! I should probably have the body a bit lower, but I did have my left arm strapped across my body, which stopped me from leaning down too far. Looking at it now, I could definitely have tried harder though!

One of the things I find hardest is that when you've leaned right over it collapses the chest and stops you from breathing easily. This is so contrary to everything I've ever been taught in any other sport that I'm struggling to reconcile it with really going for a lung-busting session. I have a singing lesson on Thursday - my first since starting wheelchair racing - and I'm looking forward to hearing my teacher's take on my new breathing posture. On the plus side, he might once have played a tenor role in an opera which required him to sing massively high and long phrases whilst being bent double, but I fear that any request for help in that regard would have to come with A LOT of explaining...

Anyway, pushing with one hand was quite fun, even though it was slow and I didn't go in a straight line. I went home keen for my arm to get better asap so that I could be a bit more like the more experienced people, who were actually going fast enough on their laps to be a blur:

There's a long way to go until I'm at this stage, but I'm looking forward to the challenge.

Week Two
Our second week started with that old undignified act of getting into the chair. It was as tight a squeeze as I remembered, and the gloves were still horrific. On the first occasion I was lucky, since I only had to wear one glove (I had busted my left arm - see previous post! - so wasn't using it), but for the second session I decided that alternating pain and lack of sensation were less irritating than only using one arm, so I wanted to use two. Getting the glove on the bad hand was a right palaver because I couldn't actually use my arm to push my hand into it at all. After quite a bit of inadvertently biting off chunks of velcro I finally managed to have both hands in gloves, and could shift the focus of my complaining to how uncomfortable my hands felt in the gloves. It took a long time for the feeling to go away in my good arm, but I was relieved that the feeling in the left arm wasn't so much of an issue! It made pushing difficult, but at least it saved everybody else from all my belly-aching.

To be fair, I wasn't the only one channelling good old Mr G about the gloves!

We headed out to the track, to see if the chairs really had been set up to go in a straight line. The short answer to this, discovered on the first 100m run, was 'no'. The longer answer was that they were a lot straighter than the previous week, but that there was still the potential for the hilarity of starting in lane 1 and ending up in the sandpit.

Everyone loves a sandpit.

I soon realised that one of my biggest problems on steering was that I tried to sit up too tall as I started pushing - I was trying to breathe, and see where I was going, but all that happened was that there wasn't enough weight going down into the front wheel, so I was just jumping it across and heading off in the wrong direction. All very frustrating. Once I'd realised what I was doing, I was able to correct it, and as we all set off again for another 100m straight I felt like I was finally beginning to get the hang of it. Halfway down, I vaguely heard the coaches telling me not to lean back, and I thought, 'OK, that makes sense, that's what I thought I was doing wrong - lean forward!' I leaned forward and pushed over the line feeling quite euphoric. I then executed my expert turning manoeuvre - you lean back a bit and then go as if to perform a wheely, pushing/stopping on the rims so as to jump the front wheel across.

Here is a skilled woman doing it right.

Unfortunately, what I hadn't realised as everyone was shouting 'don't lean back!' at me was that my anti-tip bar had fallen off 50m down the track. This meant that, in my enthusiasm, I leaned back too far until suddenly, I had flipped it. I tried to push myself back up and failed miserably, so instead just waited there, lying on my back with my arms outstretched and my legs up in the air, laughing uncontrollably at the thought of what an idiot I must look (as one particularly kind-hearted friend said, 'you looked like a turtle'.) Sadly, everyone was far too busy dashing down the track in extreme concern to help me back up to take a photo of this ridiculous incident (believe me, if there had been a photo, I would have put it up here).

It was a bit like this, but I think I looked sillier.

After that little mishap, I was a bit more careful about how I turned round (unlike in a normal wheelchair, you can't just push one one side and pull on the other to scoot about). The session continued without further incidents, partly because after that I took myself off the track for ten minutes to adjust my footplate to a more comfortable position, meaning that for ten minutes everyone else was pretty much safe. At the very end we had a final 'race' and I accidentally (honest!) veered into one of the others. However, it was the friend that called me a turtle, so I didn't feel too bad.

Looking forward to next week now!

With Rebecca - who also goes to my riding group and who didn't call me a turtle!