2/12/2023 0 Comments Polio like disease healthnut![]() And the kids' eyes would get really big when they heard that I could do all of these things."ĭentler says one memory of her daughter stands out with particular clarity. They asked me a ton of questions and it was actually pretty fun to answer them. ![]() " said, 'Who wouldn't want a mom like that?,'" says Dentler. Maya was so proud of her mom she brought her in for show and tell. ![]() By first grade, Dentler volunteered at the school to help kids learn to read, and soon they no longer paid attention to her wheelchair. In kindergarten, some of Maya's classmates teased her about having a mom in a wheelchair. She knew that she had to get closer to me." "Like when she cried, I couldn't pick her up off the floor. "Even when she was very young, things were different," Dentler says. And Dentler's also currently in the midst of another marathon - she's a mom. Since then, she's done three half-ironman triathlons - in Dubai, Morocco and Colombia. In a comment worthy of a gold medal for understatement, she says, "I think it's important to stay physically active." She covered all those miles in water and on land, propelled entirely by her arms and upper body. She missed the cutoff on her first try.īut a year later, she made it and finished the race in 14 hours, 39 minutes - the first female wheelchair athlete to complete the Ironman World Championship. "At the time, no female wheelchair athlete had ever made the time cutoffs to finish that race," Dentler says. And she kept meeting people, mostly able-bodied, with extraordinary athletic ambitions, which led her to attempt her first Ironman in Hawaii. She soon took up half-Ironman distance triathlons, a distance of nearly 70 miles. When Dentler finished the triathlon, she was motivated to go farther. Within seven months, she learned to swim and to compete using a racing wheelchair. "And so actually I signed up for the race without knowing how to swim or run." "I remember watching him at the finish line thinking, 'That's what I want to do next year,'" she says. She met a friend in a wheelchair who'd completed a triathlon. Later, when she was in her late 20s in New York City, a friend introduced her to a running club for athletes with disabilities where she learned how to hand cycle: propel a three-wheeled low-to-the-ground bike using only her upper body. And I really found it difficult to make friends." Her family, which included three siblings, was athletic Dentler often watched from the sidelines, wanting to compete herself. "And people would stare at me and kids would make fun of me. "I was just really embarrassed and self-conscious about the way I looked," she remembers. And so I had to learn how to go up the stairs." I wanted to be able to take the bus with my sister. "I didn't want to take the disabled bus to school. "In the early years, it was just me trying to be like my siblings," she says. So I spent the first few years in America just going through a number of surgeries to basically straighten me out so I could then be fitted for leg braces and crutches."ĭentler learned to handle a wheelchair and to walk by using the crutches, her legs immobile beneath her. "And my body was sort of stuck in this seated position. "Well, I couldn't walk, right?," she says. Above: Dentler at the Shriner's Hospital in Spokane, Washington, in January 1983.Īt age three and a half, she was adopted by a couple in the U.S. Ann Dentler After being adopted from India by an American couple, Minda Dentler had a series of surgeries so she'd be able to walk using braces and crutches.
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