Overcoming Challenges. 克服挑战
Listen to Dean Furness here: https://youtu.be/IOrmS8vJDQw
听听这个人（Dean Furness）的经历 https://youtu.be/IOrmS8vJDQw
Whakarongo ki te wheako a tenei tangata (Dean Furness’s) https://youtu.be/IOrmS8vJDQw
Dean Furness’s True Life Story
Life is full of uncertainties. While we are rejoicing in our glories, we need to prepare our minds for unfortunate accidents, like the one that happened to Dean Furness that December day in the year 2011. When the world collapsed on him, he found that he had to relive a new life, a new ‘me’ as he puts it.
生活充满不确定性。当我们为荣耀而高兴时，我们需要为不幸的事故做好准备，例如2011年12月那一天发生在迪恩·弗内斯（Dean Furness）身上的那场事故。当世界崩溃于他时，他发现他不得不重新生活，就像他所说的那样，是一个新的“我”。
Transcriber: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Joanna Pietrulewicz
It seems we have been measured almost all of our lives. When we are infants, we were measured by our heights and our weights, and as we grew up, it became our speeds and our strengths. Even in school, there were test scores and today we are measured by our salaries and our job performances.
It seems as if those personal averages are almost always used to measure where we are in comparison to our peers.
I think we should look at this a little differently. That personal average is just that, it is something very personal.
比上不足比下有余 - Compared to the rich, I am a long shot away from them. Compared to the poor, I have more than enough.
与富人相比，我离他们很远。与穷人相比，我已经足够了。
For me, it started on a December evening in 2011. I had just stepped outside to do our evening chores to feed our horses.
I hopped into our tractor, and a few minutes later, a five foot tall, 700-pound bale of hay fell from the loader, crushing me in the seat of the tractor and in the process shattering my T5 and T6 vertebrae.
I did not lose consciousness, but I felt this buzz throughout my body, and I knew what had happened right away. My hands were reaching for my legs, but my legs did not recognise anything touching them, and in fact, I could not feel anything from the centre of my chest down.
So there I was about 100 feet from my house, with my arms wrapped around the steering wheel, trying to hold myself up, waiting for help. And unlike what you see in TV and the movies, as much as I tried to get the dogs to go to the house and get help, they just stared at me.
Well, forty-five minutes later, my wife came home, and I heard her step out of the house and, like, normal, she asked, “Hey, do you need help?”
“Yes,” I replied.
And there was a brief pause and then I heard her yell, “Do you need 9/11 help?”
And again I yelled, “Yes.” Well, not long after that I was enjoying my very first helicopter ride, all the way to the hospital.
Now, the injury was not very dramatic or graphic. I simply broke a bone or two. In the process, I was told that I would never be able to walk again.
It became very normal for me to use a rope to sit up in bed, because my abdominal muscles were no longer working, or to use a board to slide out of bed into a wheelchair or to even wait for people to reach things for me. Everything that I had learned and had known about my height, my strength, my balance, and my mobility was blown away. My entire personal average had been reset.
Now you could be sure in those days I was being measured more than ever, by the doctors and nurses for sure but maybe more so in my own mind, and I found myself comparing what I thought I was going to be able to do going forward with what I once was able to do. I became pretty frustrated.
When we lost a limp or when we are confined to wheelchairs, what would we do? What would we be thinking of? It is no use weeping, no use self-pitying. We have to be positive and start our training program to be physically fit, in spite of our setback. I read somewhere that for one amputee, at least, she started writing inspirational stories, and “The Stream in the Desert” was born.
当我们瘫软或坐轮椅时，该怎么办？我们会在想什么？哭泣是没有用的，自欺欺人也没有用。尽管我们遇到挫折，但我们必须保持积极的态度，并开始身体健康的培训计划。我读过某个地方，至少有一个截肢者，她开始写鼓舞人心的故事，“沙漠中的小溪”诞生了。
It took some very consistent prodding from my wife, who kept saying, “Get your eyes up,” before I could get moving forward.
And I soon realised that I almost had to forget about the person I was before and the things I was able to do before.
I almost had to pretend it was never me. I was afraid that if I had not made that realisation, my frustration would have turned into something much harder to recover from.
Now, luckily, a few weeks later, I was transferred to a specialty spinal cord rehab hospital about 10 hours journey from home.
The first day of rehab and the first session we had something called fit class, and a group of us broke into teams to see which team could do the most reps in the weight machine.
I had not been to the gym for a year or two before my accident. So, I did what I thought I could do a couple of years ago. I did my best and my team went all out and won.
But, for the next three days I could not straighten my arms, which was not such a big a deal except when I needed my arms to turn the wheelchair.
This experience proved to be a very important lesson for me. It was one thing that I could not compare myself to myself (in the past), but even around people in the same situation in that hospital, I found that I could not try to keep pace or set pace with the others. I was left with really only one choice and that was to focus on who I was at that point in time.
I needed to be aware of where I needed to go and to get back to who I needed to be.
For the next six weeks, for seven to eight hours a day, I built myself up, little by little, and, as you might expect, when recovering from a spinal cord injury, I was going to have a bad day, every day.
Training for a Wheelchair Marathon: https://youtu.be/BR_QY8wujKg
Training is never a pleasure. We need to be dedicated to it. Everything that is good for us has a price. And the price for our health is the sweat that we pour out through our pores. I have known of wheelchair users slumping into poor health just because they do not live up with the vigor of daily exercises.
培训从来都不是一种乐趣。我们需要致力于它。对我们有益的一切都有代价。健康的代价是我们从毛孔中倒出的汗水。我知道轮椅使用者陷入健康状况不佳只是因为他们不适应日常锻炼的精力。
What I found out was that good and bad really did not have a lot of meaning unless I had the context of knowing what my average was. It was really up to me to decide if something was bad or good based on where I was at that point in time. It was in my control to determine if it really was a bad day.
In fact, it was my decision on whether or not I could stop a streak of bad days.
And what I found during that time away from home was that I never had a bad day, even with everything was going rotten on me.
There were parts of my day that were certainly not as pleasant as they could be, but it was never an entirely bad day.
What I found in those bad-day scenarios was that the quicker I moved on to what was next, the quicker I could start attacking things. And by moving on to next as fast as possible, I had shrunk the time I did spend in those bad scenarios thus giving more time for the good.
As a result, the good outweighed the bad.
“Practice makes Perfect”, by Eddie Wu - https://youtu.be/ylJd5sUbANE. Practice makes perfect - No, that is wrong. It is close to the truth but it is wrong. Any coach can tell us that, if we start off in the wrong method, practice does not make perfect. In fact, it makes for imperfection. To be perfect, we need to be practicing in the correct way, the correct posture, for instance, in a Tai Chi exercise.
埃迪·吴（Eddie Wu）撰写的“实践使完美”-https://youtu.be/ylJd5sUbANE。实践真是完美的吗？-不，那是错误的。这接近事实，但却是错误的。任何教练都可以告诉我们，如果我们以错误的方法开始，那么练习就不会完美。实际上，这是不完美的。为了达到完美，我们需要以正确的方式，正确的姿势进行练习，例如在太极拳练习中。
It did not matter to me if I had spent the morning really struggling with my medication, or at lunch my legs being very spastic, or even if I had fallen out of my wheelchair. They were just small parts of my day and small parts of my average.
And so, in the months and years that followed, I continued to try to attack things in that way, and before I knew it I was being presented with some pretty incredible challenges, like completing a marathon in a wheelchair.
In early 2016, I met my physical therapist, and after a few really gruelling sessions, she must have sensed something, because she pulled me aside and said, “You know, you should do a half marathon in your wheelchair, and in ten weeks.”
And I thought in my mind, “You are crazy.” I did not have a workout plan. I did not have any way of knowing how fast I needed to go or how far I was supposed to go. But I simply got to work, and I started tracking every workout, every day. I simply wanted to be as good as or as fast as I was the prior day.
Well, I finished that race right in time with what my average should have been, and somewhere along the way I kind of closed the door on who I once was.
That person who I was before and all those things I thought I was able to do really did not matter.
In fact, walking again really did not matter. It became much less of a goal for me in terms of where I was going to go.
I started researching wheelchair racing. I went online and I found the best of the best. I learned their technique, I learned about the equipment, and I was lucky to have a coach that offered me a way to get started.
And after talking with him and having him to help me get those things underway, as I was leaving, he says, “You know, you should do the 2017 Chicago Marathon.”
And he was the coach, I could not tell him no. So with that guidance, I went back home, and I got to work, much like in the prior way.
I continued researching, but I had learned my lesson. I was really careful not to compare with how accomplished those people on the internet were, and how fast they were, because if I had, I probably never would have continued going through with it.
Well, the weekend of the race arrived, and it was just like going to college for the first time. I was dumped off, there was a whole bunch of people around me.
I did not really know very many of them, somebody got the cool stereo and the cool TV and they were smart and they were pretty and they were cute and they were handsome and I did not know if I really belonged.
Well, that weekend of the race, we had a meeting called the Wheelers Meeting, and there were sixty wheelchairs in that room the night before the race.
All of the people that I had been researching were there, the best in the world. There must have been over fifty Paralympic medals in the room that day.
I felt pretty small and I fell back into that trap of comparing myself with others. I knew that the averages that I had been tracking during my workouts were over 90 seconds slower per mile than theirs. The coach was the only one there that I knew, and he reached out and he sensed my anxiety. He invited me to get food with his team. And with that, everything settled down.
I realised quickly that they did not care about my average, and surely, I had forgotten about theirs.
The next day, I finished the practice race about forty-five minutes after the person that won it. But as I was leaving, those new friends, who are very close today, challenged me to stay involved and to keep working through different races and competitions. And so I did what I knew how. I went home, and I got busy. Now, as you can imagine, being in a wheelchair. let alone training for a marathon in a wheelchair, is a pretty lonely thing.
I did have an incredible group of friends that would ride bikes with me and kept track of pace and helped me out. But in the end, I was still alone, doing sixty miles every day. For the most part, I had really nothing to rely on but myself in those times.
This fall I was in Chicago for the third time. It was my seventh marathon, and just like going back to college for my junior year, I anticipated catching up with friends and getting excited about rolling right back into things.
Well, I attended the same pre-race meeting and the same pre-race meal and caught up with those friends. We lined up for the race, and right at the start, my average kicked in, and before long I caught up with some of those friends and was able to keep pace with them and push together. But it wasn’t long before I faded. It just happened, and I found myself all alone again with really nothing to rely on other than what I had worked so hard to be at.
But we turned into the wind at the halfway point, and my average became a strong advantage, and it was not long before I caught some of those friends and passed them all the way to the finish.
And while I did not set a personal record that day, I did finish thirty seconds per mile faster than my prior Chicago times and just left myself pretty excited.
And so this is me. This is my average. Seventy-five days from today, I’ll be in Boston for my second time and I’m pretty excited about that.
But keep in mind, this isn’t really just about racing. I’m working really hard every day to be better in so many other ways, a better parent, a better husband, a better coach, teammate, friend, person. And I promise you that even though what you see here is very visible in terms of the challenges that I face, everybody here has something that they are fighting, and it may be visible, it may not be, but please, take some time and focus on you instead of on others.
I bet you can win those challenges and really start accomplishing so many great things.
Thank you.
English