Melissa Stockwell was wearing a brace over her right hand, trying to protect the thumb and wrist she somehow strained a couple of weeks ago.
It might have happened while shifting gears on her triathlon bike, and she might have aggravated it while using an Allen wrench on the prosthetic devices she helps fit for her Chicago employer, Sheck and Siress.
The only sure things about the injury are that it is an annoyance and it won’t prevent her from competing in Sunday’s Accenture ParaTriathlon Challenge, the newest part of the Chicago Triathlon program.
After all, what is a sore hand to a woman who went from losing nearly all of her left leg five years ago in Iraq to swimming at the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing, where she carried the American flag in the Closing Ceremony while wearing a prosthetic leg decorated with stars and stripes?
Just a month ago, Stockwell was third of five women finishers in the handcycle division at the Sadler’s Alaska Challenge, a 250-mile, eight-day race with 16,000 feet of climbing billed as the “longest wheelchair and handcycle race in the world.”
At 29, the retired Army lieutenant decorated with a Purple Heart and Bronze Star thinks her handcycling days should be over. Stockwell is ready to concentrate on paratriathlon, a sport pushing for inclusion on the 2016 Paralympic Games program.
“Competitively, it’s unfair for me to do handcycle, because I have the ability to ride an upright bike and run, so I want to focus on that,” Stockwell said during an interview at a Near West Side coffee shop.
Running is what she finds the most challenging.
No prosthetic is needed for swimming, the sport she took up while recovering from the war injury at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The bicycle prosthetic leg, with its free-swinging knee, is relatively easy for her to use.
It has taken Stockwell more time to get comfortable with the more complicated prosthetic leg for running — and she wasn’t much of a runner on two legs, either.
“Now that I can’t, I want to,” Stockwell said, then quickly amended her words.
“I’m not going to say, ‘Now that I can’t,'” she said. “I mean, ‘Now that it’s harder, I want to.'”
Sunday’s race, using the Olympic standards, has a .93-mile swim, a 24.9-mile bike ride and a 6.2-mile run.
The only full triathlon Stockwell has done, Aug. 1 in LaPorte, Ind., was over a sprint course: quarter-mile swim, 12.4-mile bike, 3.4-mile run. Her longest training run, done on the track at Concordia University near her home in Forest Park, has been 4 miles.
“I know I can cross the finish line,” she said. “It’s just a matter of how long it takes.”
Stockwell said she always had that kind of competitive spirit, beginning with her years as a gymnast a Minnesota newspaper once described as an Olympic hopeful. What happened April 13, 2004, when her Humvee hit an improvised explosive device in Baghdad, only enhanced that side of her personality.
“I made a choice early on to realize I am not going to get my leg back and to move on,” she said.
She never had heard of the Paralympics when her husband, Dick, encouraged her to attend a meeting in early 2005 with a U.S. Paralympic official at Walter Reed.
“As soon as I knew what the Paralympics were about, I knew I had to try,” she said.
She had been a club-level rower and diver at the University of Colorado. After 15 surgeries on the maimed limb, she was trying to become an elite disabled swimmer.
That commitment would entail being separated from her husband, an Army lieutenant now in his third year at Loyola University medical school, while she spent eight months training at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.
The reward was making the Paralympic swim team and competing in three events at Beijing. The soldier whose uniform said “U.S. Army” had become the athlete whose uniform said “USA.”
“It was almost like it had come full circle, being able to represent the United States in a totally different way,” she said. “I keep telling myself that regardless of my performance, I still made my goal of being there.”
The competitor in her remains upset at having failed to make the finals in any event, especially the 400 freestyle, in which she set a national record at the U.S. trials.
But the only sad postscript to Stockwell’s Paralympic story occurred last month, when her mentor, U.S. Paralympic swim coach Jimi Flowers, fell to his death while mountain climbing in Colorado. Flowers has become another reason for Stockwell to press forward.
“It is almost that I am doing these things for those who can’t,” she said. “I will put myself through anything to get to that finish line.”
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Triathlon facts
When: Sunday, starts of six different events involving 9,000 participants from 6 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.
Where: Begins at Monroe Harbor sea wall. Finishes on Columbus Drive south of Balbo.
Who: Pro race, beginning at 11:15, includes Olympic triathletes from the U.S. and United Kingdom. It is part of Life Time Fitness Triathlon Series.
Watching: Best places include lakefront and Balbo for swim; North Avenue bridge over Lake Shore Drive for bike; Shedd Aquarium-Museum Campus for run.
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phersh@tribune.com
