"First You Feel Like Dying. Then You Feel Reborn."

Sunday, November 6 2011

“First You Feel Like Dying. Then You Feel Reborn.”

The title of this post is taken from the background of a photograph made today by Joao Silva, as he completed his first marathon after losing his legs last year to a PMN landmine near the Arghandab River in Afghanistan. That’s Joao in the iPhone-made image above.

To see several of the photographs that Joao made as he raced, go to the Lens blog. The image referred to in this post’s title is image #3 in the accompanying slide show.

The Lens post was one the most moving reads of the day. But The Times had another.

Read the story in Sunday Sports of Bob Wieland, an Army medic who lost his legs in Vietnam in 1969 when he stepped on an 82-mm mortar round that had been hidden in the soil as a booby trap. Hastily pronounced dead, he was zipped into a body bag. But he must have moved in there. At a field hospital, someone unzipped the bag, found signs of life, and resuscitated him.

Seventeen years later, in 1986, Bob Wieland entered his first New York City Marathon, essentially walking on his hands. From the NYT:

Wieland recalled feeling out of place as he sat at the starting line, his height reaching just short of 3 feet, surrounded by a few dozen disabled runners who began the race about three hours earlier than the able-bodied.

“I felt like I got lost in the shuffle,” Wieland said. “I was like a turtle among 25,000 people, determined to get to the finish line.”

He reached the finish line. It took him 98 hours.

The ad slogan in image #3 in Joao’s slide show seemed to say something about professional athletes, about bearing down and pushing through. Those athletes know almost nothing, not next to what these men know.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Top: Joao Silva, the 2011 NYC Marathon, by David Gonzalez. Bottom: Bob Wieland, the 1986 NYC Marathon, by Marilynn K. Yee. The New York Times.