This is my path to work when I ride my bike. Of course I thought it was like a thousand kilometers, but it turns out that it's actually only 49km round-trip. It's mostly path riding, and pretty fun.
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1824297
Gmaps Pedometer is a pretty cool tool!
When I was a kid I had formulated a rough plan to develop an upper body by using a wheelchair. Even then, although I acknowledged that there was stigma attached to the wheelchair, I really just saw it as a tool. I was far too lazy to commit to an exercise regime, and saw nothing at all wrong with the idea of using a wheelchar for exercise. I mean, I had to get from place to place regardless, so why not seated and using my arms for propulsion?
This never happened, of course. No one just hands you a wheelchair because you're too lazy to lift weights, but I remained curious. When I was a teenager I went to the mall and told the people at that booth in the centre that I needed a wheelchair for my grandmother. I pushed it around the corner and sat, wondering how it would feel. It felt like... sitting. Okay, I knew how to sit. The mechanics of steering were easier, and way more responsive, than I had anticipated. Turning one wheel backwards while turning one wheel forwards meant that I could turn a circle in place. Hey, this was actually fun!
Then I tried wheeling around the mall, and the social experiment began. Because while technically a wheelchair is just a tool -- a wheeled chair -- socially it is something very different. Suddenly I occupied a weird zone of obvious social discomfort. People's eyes would skitter away. A door would be held open by someone pointedly looking not-at-me. At first I thought that it was just because my eye level was lower than all those upright people, but then I realized that it was more like we were all playing Monopoly, and I had landed on Go To Jail. We were all still playing the same game, but we couldn't interact within the context of the game until I rolled doubles and got out of the chair.
The jail analogy is a good one, I think. It's why there are so many taboos about using a wheelchair if you don't need to. Disabled people are thought to be "confined" to a wheelchair in the same way that prisoners are confined to their cells. No one hangs out in a jail cell, so why would someone want to play with a wheelchair? It's further complicated by the idea that it's somehow mocking disabled people to use the same tools that they do... to use a wheelchair when you can get out of it anytime you like is to "pretend" to be in jail.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about all this the last couple of days, since hearing that Chinese Olympic organizers have eliminated wheelchair racing as a demonstration sport from the Beijing Games. Wheelchair racing will once again be limited to the Paralympics, where it properly belongs, to be watched only by those people who'd have some reason to be interested in the activities of "crippled athletes."
I think this is completely weird. Wheelchair racing is a sport that uses a tool. Like cycling. Like the luge. It is only this bizarre social construct we have built surrounding the wheelchair-as-jail that means that it's excluded from the "real" Olympics. But really, it's just a tool. Like a bicycle. I say, Integration Uber Alles. Don't level the playing field by segregating wheelchair athletes to their own games. Level the playing field by inviting anyone who wants to use the tool to play wheelchair games, and include wheelchair games as mainstream athletic pursuits. Anyone who thinks that so-called able-bodied athletes would have an edge over the so-called disabled athletes needs to maybe watch some reruns of the Paralympic Games.