This rolling inspiration is Xie Junwu, an iron-willed wheelchair-bound althlete who’s climbed mountains, completed marathons, and now spends his days skateboarding.
Xie has been breaking records and barriers for years with his wheelchair capabilities, and now in middle age, he is helping others build confidence in their maneuvering with what is almost certainly China’s first wheelchair skateboarding training center.
Xie often says that if you carry on through the storm, you’ll surely see the rainbow, and a storm is exactly what he faced. At age 19, he fell from a tree he was climbing during a geology internship field trip and damaged his thoracic vertebrae, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.
Seeing no future, he languished at home for 8 years without ever stepping foot outside alone. His mother had assumed the full responsibility of caring for the paraplegic young man. Though he had always promised her he would develop some form of independence, it was her death in the year 2000 that spurred him on, with the promise taking on a new form of urgency: necessity.
In 2004, he attended a spinal cord injury meetup and saw someone balance their wheelchair on its back wheels alone: a kind of ‘wheelchair wheelie.’ Xie began watching mostly foreign videos online of people performing advanced wheelchair maneuvers, including going up and down stairs, and resolved to mimic them.
Plenty of nasty falls would follow until there was Xie, in 2012, shaking hands with an observer from the Guinness World Records when he completed the longest-ever wheelchair wheelie at 25.8 kilometers, or around 16 miles.
Over the following decade, Xie summited the almost 6,000-foot Mount Huangshan 4 times, and completed 32 marathons, including the New York City Marathon.
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In 2014, he first tried skateboarding. He cleverly attached some metal rails onto the board that would keep his wheelchair’s wheels from simply rolling off as he used them to press left and right on the board just as a skater would do with his feet.
Even for this wheelchair ace, it was really difficult, and he put the interest on hold while he pursued marathoning.
Last November, Xie found a new training base in his home city of Nanchang that had the perfect courtyard, with a series of curves and gentle gradients, where he could get back to practicing wheelchair skateboarding.
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After getting the hang of it and making a name for himself through viral online videos, he opened a sports rehab clinic called the Nanchang City Hope House for the wheelchair-bound, explaining that these kinds of coordinated activities help build the musculature, strengthen the heart, and fortify one’s immune system.
One day he hopes to hold a wheelchair skateboard competition in China, which would be the first of its kind, admitting it’s a “small goal I’m pursuing.”
WATCH his inspirational life story, as told by him, below…
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