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Mosher finds new life through cross-country skiing

Whistler Paralympian’s rehabilitation efforts boosted with awarding of 2010 Games
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"The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart."

- Fritz Lang

 

For Tyler Mosher, it wasn't just a mediator - it was the motivator that made him walk again.

The 37-year-old skier and snowboarder from Whistler is primed to represent his country in two cross-country skiing events at the 2010 Paralympic Winter Games. Though he isn't confident of his chances for a medal, he's feeling as strong as he ever has and looks to finish among the world's best in the 10-kilometre and classic sprint races, on March 18 and 21, respectively.

"The top guys in my division could beat half of the field in the Olympic division," he says in an interview. "That's the level that we're competing at."

Mosher says he's been an athlete all his life. Born in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, he played football and rugby growing up and played for UBC's varsity rugby team between 1990 and 1991. Around the same time he began spending his summers in Whistler and moved here full-time after he was finished school.

With a degree in environmental planning from another school, he ended up designing landscapes for a living... and riding as a lifestyle.

Mosher's life as an athlete came to a halt in 2000, when he was snowboarding on the Blackcomb Glacier. He rode over a snow drift that covered a 10-metre hole in the glacier. He fell into the hole, "exploding" his L1 vertebra and damaging his spinal cord. Ten hours of surgery found the spinal cord damage wasn't as bad as it might have been, but doctors weren't optimistic about his chances of walking again.

"They said it was highly unlikely," Mosher says. "In fact they said I wouldn't walk again. It wasn't until post-surgery that we had some recruitment of muscles, but in general the realism that I was prepared for, even if I could walk again, was that I would fatigue and fall and I would always have to have a wheelchair nearby."

Soon Mosher discovered that he could regain some muscle use in his lower body. He would never use some of his internal organs again and his back had to be reconstructed using titanium rods but there was still some strength left in his legs.

Though preparing for life in a wheelchair, he did physiotherapy for six to eight hours a day in the wake of his accident and literally taught his body to walk again.

"Although I was learning to walk a bit, aided by a walker, two canes or at this point, parallel bars, it wasn't realistic that I would be walking out of (the rehabilitation centre)," he says.

A friend told him that he could learn to use a wheelchair at any point in his life or he could try walking and falling until he fell no more. He took up yoga and cross-country skiing as a means of rehabilitation about two years after the accident. He couldn't walk on snow but cross-country skiing helped teach him how to use active muscles to compensate for ones he could no longer control.

The result of his rehabilitation is that it's less painful for him to ski than it is to walk. He can get around by walking on his heels but when skiing he can look like he's using the ball of his foot... but he's not. He uses muscles such as his quads to do jobs that his gluteus maximus might otherwise do. He worked up to 60 per cent walking ability and he remains there to this day.

"I've just been lucky that the muscles that I did get back are the muscles that enable me to walk," he says. "It could have been a different set of muscles."

July 2, 2003 brought an extra spark to his rehabilitation. When it was announced that Whistler would be a venue for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, Mosher was transfixed.

"I looked into what it would take to get on the national team for cross-country skiing and make the Paralympic Games," he said.

He started at the bottom, spending his own money to travel and train until he progressed to the international level.

Mosher made the Paralympic team and now he's aiming to be among the top 16 for classic sprint and the top 20 for the 10 kilometre race.

But his Paralympic journey won't end there. Mosher is fighting to see adaptive snowboarding included on the bill for the 2014 Paralympic Games and after, but there's no certainty it will happen.

"To be included in the Paralympic Games, you have to have the sport developed to the level it can be included," he says. "In order for nations to justify financially supporting a sport and athletes, the sport needs to be in the Olympics or Paralympics. So we run into a situation of which comes first, the horse or the cart.

"We have, in our opinion, done the best we can do and we will continue to do the best for promoting adaptive snowboarding.... I'm sure there are many people living with disabilities who snowboard or want to snowboard and have limited opportunities to do so because it isn't a Paralympic sport."

It took Mosher a long time to reconnect his mind with his limbs but his heart made it happen. He was told he'd never walk again but now he's a Paralympic athlete, skiing in one of the biggest events in the world.

 

 



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