Susannah Scaroni Wins the Chicago Marathon Women’s Wheelchair Race


One moment Susannah Scaroni, a Paralympic gold medalist, was cruising through a training session on a road she had traveled so many time before.

The next she was lying on the side of road, thrown free of her wheelchair, staring up at the sky and an unknowable road back to her life at the top of the distance racing world.

A 31-year-old native of Washington State, she had been rear-ended during an early morning solo training session. Paralyzed below the waist since she was 5, Scaroni fractured three vertebrae and her knee in that crash last September.

Somehow, she was training with a handcycle two weeks later and would go on to set a world record in the 5,000 meters — to back up her gold medal at the Tokyo Paralympics in the distance — eight months after the accident.

On Sunday morning, she won the Chicago Marathon with a time of 1 hour 45 minutes 48 seconds. The gold is her third marathon medal in three weeks, capping off a third-place finish at the Berlin Marathon on Sept. 25 and a second-place finish at the London Marathon on Oct. 2.

“No pain!” she said Tuesday from her home in Champaign, Ill.

None of this has surprised Adam Bleakney, Scaroni’s coach, who also leads the wheelchair track and field team at the University of Illinois.

“If there is one true thing you can say about Susannah and this population it’s that they have already gone through so many things, traumas really, just to get to the starting line,” Bleakney said in a recent interview. “People like Susannah can sustain this type of adversity and leverage it.”

Scaroni did not spend too much time thinking about the roller coaster of the last 13 months as she pushed through the flat and fast course in Berlin. She, Debrunner and Manuela Schӓr, another Swiss racer, broke from the field after successfully traversing some railroad tracks around the five mile mark. They spent the next 20 miles taking turns bearing the brunt of the headwind before the sprint to the finish through the Brandenburg Gate.

“I felt really strong out there,” Scaroni said last week from London.

That sensation would have been hard to imagine last September, after Scaroni tumbled out of her chair onto the side of Wheeler Road not far from her home. Scaroni usually trains with the a group of wheelchair athletes on Illinois’ vaunted team, which has produced stars like Tatyana McFadden, the eight-time Paralympic gold medalist. A pack of eight or 10 wheelchair racers are far easier to see than just one, especially on the roads near the university where the wheelchair athletes are a familiar site.

On that Thursday morning last September though, Scaroni, who is completing her master’s degree in nutrition science and kinesiology at Illinois, had to get to her shift at a local clinic and needed to train before her teammates.

She remembers cruising along at roughly 17 miles an hour and then suddenly moving very quickly.

“I thought, ‘this is going to be bad,’ and the next thing I knew I was in the dirt and someone was walking toward me and asking if I was OK,” she said.

She was not. She had scrapes and burns across her arms and legs. Scans revealed the fractured vertebrae. Doctors put her in a clamshell-shaped back brace that she would wear every moment she was not sleeping for the next four months. Her racing chair was off limits.

After two weeks though, doctors cleared her to begin doing some aerobic training with her arms, as long as she did not strain her back. Bleakney rigged a handcycle to a workout bench, which allowed Scaroni to lie on her back and pedal with her hands and arms. She began with 20 minutes a day and eventually worked up to 90 minutes.

“That woman just loves training,” Bleakney said of Scaroni. “If you told her she could never race again, it wouldn’t matter. She would still train all the time.”

Perhaps, but Scaroni has also been addicted to competition since her journey in wheelchair sports began when she was in elementary school. She has few memories of her life before she was paralyzed.

She sustained her initial injury when the car her mother was driving slipped on ice and collided with an oncoming vehicle. She was in the back seat. Her oldest brother, Jesse, who was in the front seat, suffered a brain injury. Doctors feared he would not make it through the night. He survived, and so did her mother. Scaroni’s father had died of brain cancer when she was an infant.

Scaroni was paralyzed and became the only person in a wheelchair in her tiny town of Tekoa, Wash., population 800. After her accident, the town cut the curbs at street corners into ramps and installed an elevator in the local high school years before she would enroll. Those efforts, she said, always made her feel included in everyday activities.

She did not, however, like playing basketball in gym class as students had to follow rules to include her in the game. It felt patronizing, she said.

So she was a little leery when her mother insisted on taking her to a sports clinic at Shriners Hospital in Spokane an hour away when she was in fourth grade. But on the court with other kids in wheelchairs she felt integrated into the game and quickly became obsessed with the sport. Soon her mother was driving her two hours round-trip to practice every week, and when an opportunity to compete on a track team arrived, she joined that, too, and thrived.

She wanted to attend Illinois out of high school, but Bleakney did not have a scholarship available for an out-of-state student athlete. When he did two years later, Scaroni transferred from Carroll College in Montana in 2011. The next year she competed in the Paralympics in London.

Since 2017, she has balanced the life of a full-time professional racer with her graduate studies. She collects about $16,000 a year plus health insurance from the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and some additional support from sponsors. Prize money from racing, which brings in roughly $50,000 a year, pays the bulk of the bills.

“After the accident, I told myself, ‘if there is a race, wherever it is, I want to do it,’” she said.

In January, she was finally able to get back in her racing chair. She had to rebuild the core strength needed to sustain the upright position that pushing in the chair requires. Last year’s crash made that more difficult because her spine is now pitched further forward. But she was determined to get back on a starting line as fast as possible, even if she had not regained her fitness, because so many races had been canceled during the first 20 months of the pandemic.

So far, so good. The 10-kilometer Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta on July 4 offered a $53,000 bonus for runners who broke the course record to share, in honor of the 53rd year of the race. Scaroni was the only one to set a course record.

The Chicago Marathon is something of a home game for the Illinois team. Bleakney, who now prohibits training alone on the roads, faced some 15 athletes in the race. It offers $25,000 to the winner and prize money for the first 10 finishers, making it one of the most lucrative wheelchair marathons in the world.

Three weeks later, Scaroni will race in the New York City Marathon, which takes place on the kind of rolling, hilly course she favors.

Carey Pinkowski, the Chicago race director, said every competitor could learn something valuable from the athletes in the wheelchair field. Last year, many of them competed in the Chicago and Boston marathons on consecutive days. Travel for anyone in a wheelchair has its share of challenges. Factor in the logistics of two major marathons in 24 hours — plus shipping a chair worth more than $30,000 in some cases, and it was enough to rattle anyone’s nerves.

Some of them weren’t getting to Boston until near midnight, and then they had to get up at dawn and race and yet they were just rolling with it. “Adversity is not an issue with them,” Pinkowski said. “It’s refreshing.”



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