Push To The Finish

He’s racing in the Ironman Wisconsin, breathlessly biking up a hill. His body is at peak physical exhaustion; he’s combatting the mental games his mind is playing against his capability to keep pushing. Then, from behind, he hears, “Christian, are you doing all right?”

The question comes from Mary Cox, the woman he’s pulling in a racing chair attached to his bike. This is why Christian Jensen is racing.

“Yes, I can do this,” he thinks to himself with renewed energy. “I’m doing it for Mary.”

Cox has muscular dystrophy, and she is unable to move. But that doesn’t stop her from crossing the finish line among the other athletes. Jensen made it his mission to ensure that she, and others with disabilities, would have that opportunity by creating the Wisconsin chapter of myTEAM TRIUMPH.

Through his journey, Jensen realized the passion he felt in serving others and was fueled by the love he felt from the community and those given the opportunity to participate in the organization.

Jensen didn’t foresee his future panning out like it has. His vision when he started working at Bellin Health in Green Bay as a personal trainer was to eventually train track and field athletes. But his path shifted when he met Cox, his first client, in 2008.

“[Mary] came in riding her husband’s back,” for their first consult, Jensen remembers, adding that he had never worked — or even had personal interactions — with people with disabilities.

“You see people with disabilities when you’re young — like when you’re in school, out in the community — and I think like most people I was really unsure of ‘How do I interact with this person?’ and maybe a little fear in that,” Jensen says. “I don’t want them to feel like I’m talking down to them. I don’t want them to feel like I’m pitying them, but I want to help them, so there was really that ignorance that I had that limited me in terms of how I was interacting with people. So therefore, I never really had a relationship, and I never really got to know someone who had a disability. And Mary, because of circumstances, was that first person.”

Cox initially hoped Jensen would help her walk again, but the most movement she was eventually capable of was brief walking with assistance. About a month into their training, Jensen realized there would be no way to reverse the effects of muscular dystrophy for Cox.

“I got to a point in her training where I was like, ‘Gosh, what can I do with Mary?’ I really felt like I was at a dead end of helping her physically,” Jensen says.

But like any good story, that dead-end feeling was precisely when his “Aha!” moment came.  

Jensen was attending church with his wife, Tricia, when they were shown a video of a father pushing his son, who has cerebral palsy, in a racing wheelchair through endurance events over the past 30 years. That’s when Jensen realized it wasn’t about fixing Cox or trying to take away her disability. It was about giving her a sense of inclusion and celebrating who she was.

“His disability, yes, while it limited him physically, it actually opened up doors for him in ways that would have not been opened if he did not have a disability. It helped him and his father to inspire people in ways that they would have never been able to do,” Jensen says.

With this newfound inspiration, Jensen went back to Cox with the proposal of running a 10K — the Bellin Run — together.

Little did Jensen know when he asked Cox that she had already participated in the Bellin Run in her own way years ago when she could still walk. But her way didn’t include being surrounded by runners and cheering fans. Cox would wake up at the crack of dawn to slowly walk the entire course, finishing in time to watch her sons run in the official event. Her instability in walking and her fear of getting in the way of others propelled her to avoid the real event, so when Jensen offered to push her, she was all in.

Their journey began by training for the Bellin Run, with Jensen pushing Cox in a child’s running stroller borrowed from a friend. Even with Cox’s leaner figure, one can imagine it wasn’t the most comfortable, but it was a start. The pair didn’t have professional equipment or even much knowledge about it, but they had the motivation, so they ran with it.

“I took Mary for a test run, and she loved it. She loved it. She was outside, the wind was in her hair,” Jensen recollects with a smile.

For Cox and many others with severe physical disabilities, life presents various adversities. The insignificant things that most take for granted — being able to dress and feed oneself, being able to take a shower or get out of bed every morning — these are things Cox is unable to do by herself. Instead, these moments are structured in the hands of a caregiver. Other than her organized routine, much of Cox’s days would be spent sitting at her desk and looking at the world outside, never fully being able to be part of the community.

So being in the stroller, outside in the fresh air, feeling the rush of the wind and not having to worry about routine or limitations — there’s a special serenity that comes with that.

“I feel so free,” Cox says.

Getting the opportunity to race in the actual event alongside other runners and hearing the cheers by spectators was a special moment for Cox. “I was just crying at the end, it was so exciting,” she grins.

Jensen didn’t anticipate the impact that the run would have on Cox or the community. “She felt like she was inspiring others, and the crowds were cheering like crazy for her,” Jensen says. “We had no idea how powerful that experience would be.”

Pushing Cox also provided Jensen with the motivation to run. A natural question springs from the idea of pushing someone long distances while running: “How on earth is someone capable of doing that?”

Jensen’s answer is simple.

“People always say to me, ‘I don’t know how you do it,’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t know how you don’t do it with someone.’ I mean, it’s a partnership. It’s inspirational,” he says.

After their first race, Jensen and Cox decided to take it a step further and tackle a marathon. They participated in the Green Bay Cellcom Marathon in 2009 and received local TV coverage about their story, which drew in a flood of support and interest from the community.

At that point, Jensen knew he wanted to branch out and find a way to include others who may want the same opportunity. That’s when he came across myTEAM TRIUMPH, a national nonprofit started in Michigan dedicated to providing those with disabilities the opportunity to participate in endurance athletics.

Jensen started the first chapter of the organization in Wisconsin in 2010. The chapter is based out of Green Bay, but there are teams and training in regions throughout the state. Since then, more than 1,000 people with disabilities, called “captains,” have crossed finish lines. These captains have been pushed by more than 5,000 so-called “angel” athletes.

Since starting the Wisconsin chapter, Jensen and other athletes have participated in events ranging from one-mile runs to the IronMan Wisconsin triathlon. The structure of the captain-angel team centers on the idea of teamwork. Each myTEAM TRIUMPH team consists of three angels and one captain to foster relationship building and motivation.  

Runners find themselves completing longer, tougher races after their initial experience with the organization.

“Once you do one race with myTEAM TRIUMPH, you’re sucked in,” says Autumn Siudzinski, who has worked her way up to running a half marathon with her team. “You want to just do it forever. And especially for people like myself who run all the time, I’m running anyway, so why not share in it with someone else?”

Jensen described how captains talk to the angels during the race and keep them motivated. And if captains are unable to speak, their expressions speak for them.

“You see the smile on their face, you see they’re giggling, their arms are up in the air, and that’s providing me the purpose,” Jensen explains.

The partnerships between the angels and captains are mutually beneficial, but in different ways. The angels provide more tangible aspects, being the arms, legs and lungs for the captain. The captains’ contributions, however, are beneath the surface.

“The captain is there to help us have a better outlook on life and help us understand what’s most important,” Jensen explains. “I think about how society is so like drive-thru, quick connections that we have with people. We don’t stop and think about how we interact with people a whole lot. Captains really help us think about that and have that experience to slow down and connect on a deeper level.”

Perhaps even more, it gives the runners a chance to reflect.

“It helps those of us who are able-bodied to understand that, you know, we all have a disability in some way,” Jensen says. “It might not be visible. It might be a mental thing; it might be something from our past; it might be something that’s happened to us, an addiction, anything. Really, a disability is anything that limits us from really exploring what we’re meant to be.”

Because of the deeper effect the angel-captain relationship provides, myTEAM TRIUMPH doesn’t consider itself an athletic organization. Instead, the organization prides itself on being a human services organization that uses running, biking and triathlons to enrich the lives of people with diverse abilities.

“That’s all we do,” Jensen says. “It’s just about bringing people together who have a common goal and have varying abilities and challenges. And we know that when you have a start and finish and come together, something really magical can happen.”