This past Monday Cheri Blauwet, molecular biologist and winner of the Women’s 800m Wheelchair gold medal in the 2004 Summer Paralympics, gave a talk on the social impact of Paralympic sports and the changing paradigm around disability through her own life experiences.
Blauwet travelled to Japan, Beijing, Lebanon, New York, Boston and Los Angeles competing in both Olympic sporting events and marathons.
She has spoken out on Paralympic athletes for years now and this was her first visit to Wyoming to speak on the subject. Before her talk, Blauwet shared some of her history, experiences and life as an athlete.
To start off, between your medical and athletic careers, what came first for you? Not necessarily whether you had a doctorate or a medal first, but what you aspired to become first.
Sure, sure, well I don’t have a doctorate PhD-wise, but molecular biology was my major in undergrad and then I went to med school. My doctorate is an MD, a doctorate of medicine. As it relates to sports versus my academic work, it’s really hard to say one came before the other because I continued through school as I was competing so they really happened in parallel.
I had read that you started racing in high school, so you knew that you wanted to follow a medical career all the way back then?
I started down that road as an undergrad and I know a lot of people end up shifting one way or the other because it’s a definitely a rigorous road in medicine, but if it’s right for you then it’s phenomenal and certainly something that I never deterred from once I started. I also really like the human interaction, working with people and wanting to be in-clinic on a daily basis working with patients and working with people to help them live active lifestyles and be healthy.
Do you find that your medical practice goes hand-in-hand with being an athlete as well, do they ever conflict with each other?
No, not at all! In fact I think they build on one another really well because in sports medicine our whole goal is to make sure people get active and stay active. I love that we’re there with people when they might have something that’s holding them back from being active. It’s a great way to embody the lessons learned as an athlete and taking it to the next level professionally.
Did all this wrap into you wanting to talk about para-athletes as well?
Sports at a grassroots community level are a great way to promote healthy lifestyles and get our youth in a really good place in terms of their physical activity and taking care of themselves as adults. Having a conversation about sport, and especially sport for individuals with disabilities, is a real important concept to make sure that we promote active and healthy lifestyles. It’s easy to tack on the part about being an elite athlete because that’s something we need to promote opportunities for.
When you were a practicing athlete, what did you find were the most challenging and rewards aspects of that lifestyle?
Honestly, I think the most rewarding part was the relationships formed with other athletes, especially athletes from other parts of the world where I might not have had the opportunity to travel or I didn’t know much about. The biggest challenge when you’re an athlete, especially when you start to compete nationally and internationally, it can be a bit disorienting because you’re travelling a lot and it’s sometimes hard at the end of the day. You crave a bit of “home base.” Sometimes you just want to be home and sleep in your own bed.
Being so far from “home base”, what was the most interesting place that you’ve visited when you were a competing athlete?
I had the opportunity one year to do the Beirut Marathon in Lebanon. It was a fairly peaceful time in Lebanon then, the year I did it. Being there you could tell it was a place that had recently experienced a lot of unrest and was still reeling from that in many ways so that was really amazing to be there and to get to know the people and see how they were using something like the marathon to try to build peace and build good relationships between different people in the city and in the country.
And you’ve found that athletic competitions can do that?
Very much so. I think one of the powerful things about sports is that it’s a common language. It’s a lot easier to see past your differences when you having something like sports that brings people together
Do you have any tips for any athlete that might want to compete in any sort of major sporting event like the ones you’ve been in?
I think life has different phases and sometimes if you’re, for example, wanting to compete in the Olympics or the Paralympics, that can kind of trump everything else in life and you end living a very one-track life for a while. I think keeping your eye on the prize, avoiding all those other distractions, is okay for now. Later in life you’ll be able to return to having more diversity, sleeping in on the weekends and eating dessert, but for a period of time that may not be quite what you need.
And since that phase of your life is over with, are you finding yourself more relaxed nowadays?
I think I’m the kind of person where I always take on challenges. I still may have that pressure in life, but it’s different, for different things and endeavors. Generally speaking, after finishing my competitive career it’s certainly enabled me to open my eyes back up to the world a little bit and just enjoy it.
