The Astros are playing in Houston tonight but we already won in Boston this week!
A League City woman, Wendy Larsen, won the Boston Marathon handcycling race.
She is a handcyclist because she has a rare disease, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS).
On Sunday, she won the race, crushing the competition by nine minutes. Plus, it was her 50th birthday. Could there be any better birthday present?
“It was a little chaotic and I wasn’t percent 100% positive that I won until I crossed the finish line,” Larsen admitted.
Larsen said it hasn’t even fully set in that all her dreams and goals were achieved this week, but it’s been a long time coming.
EDS makes her joints weak and frequently dislocate. It’s also made it almost impossible to be physically active but she’s not the type of person to let that stop her.
“Most of my life I was told by doctors that I could not play sports, I could not run, I could not do anything that would put any kind of impacts on my joints and got told ‘no’ a lot,” she said.
On top of autoimmune disorders, she’s had gastrointestinal problems and spine issues which she says has made her sedentary in the past and gain a lot of weight. At one point, she said she was 100 pounds overweight.
“Once I got interested in hand cycling, that really moved me to start losing some of the weight because the more weight I could lose the lighter I would be, the more competitive I could be, the easier it would be, that sort of thing,” Larsen said. “It is very difficult and it’s a very difficult balancing act that you have to make sure you get the right ratio of carbs and protein and fats and make sure you’re eating the right things.”
She said she reached her goal weight the morning she left for Boston and the rest is history… really, she made history.
“I set a personal record, by quite a bit, came in first place and I set a course record for women’s handcycle,” she said.
Team Catapult and Achilles International are a couple of organizations that help athletes with disabilities and they played a big role in Larsen’s success.
