How Emily Young poured her injury rage into training and became a Paralympian
The rage that once propelled Emily Young is long gone.
Eight years after a devastating arm injury derailed her Olympic wrestling aspirations, she is mere months away from a Paralympic Games debut in cross-country skiing and biathlon. It has been a journey of self-preservation and discovery.
Young suffered a severely dislocated right elbow and shoulder, as well as extensive nerve damage, during a training session at a wrestling camp in Jasper, Alta., in July 2009. She was just 18 then, but had already poured 10 years of her life into the sport, had trained with Olympic gold medalist Carol Hyunh, and was seriously eyeballing the 2012 Games in London as her own shot at the big time.
Quite suddenly, her wrestling career was done, though that sobering fact wasn’t made clear until 2010, after surgery to repair ligaments in her elbow. The extent of the nerve damage became evident then and has in fact worsened — she has no feeling down to her fingers — and doctors told her the risk of further serious injury in a contact sport like wrestling was much too great.
“Wrestling was my life. I defined myself as a wrestler. So I got angry,” she said this week. “I wouldn’t define myself as injured, so I did other sports. I went on a rage. It was full-on rage training.”
The North Vancouver native dove into Ironman triathlon, training with and competing against able-bodied athletes.
“I wanted to really suffer and hurt, I think. In hindsight, it was the best way of managing it for me, for my sanity.
“Because at that point, wrestling was all I had. But I knew how to do sports and I was athletic and it was something I knew I had to do. What I didn’t know was how to function in a one-armed world. I had to learn to brush my teeth and use a fork. I was very not left-handed. It was a full learning process.”
Along the way she decided cross-country skiing would be her third sporting addiction. Just as she learned to swim with one arm, she learned to ski with her right arm strapped to her chest, poling with her left.
“I say I have one and a half arms. It’s fully there but it’s just half the length. It’s just stuck, bent at 90 degrees,” she said. “We call it the T-Rex arm.”
Yes, her sense of humour is fully intact. She’s 26, married, and no longer angry. And despite the fact she took up skiing only two years ago, she has already propelled herself onto a Para-Nordic World Cup podium. In March, she will compete at the Paralympics in PyeongChang in both cross-country and biathlon. Her rapid ascension has been hard to process.
“I never did alpine skiing or cross-country skiing as a kid. I kind of stayed away from winter. I’m from Vancouver. We didn’t have winter,” she laughed. “And my original sport, wrestling, has nothing to do with endurance or skiing or anything over six minutes long.”
Emily Young
But just as she did with triathlon, she went all-in on cross-country skiing. She tried roller skiing for the first time in July 2014, and hit the snow on skinny skis that winter. It was a lonely and at first awkward pursuit, but she was determined to get better.
“After the first year of really putting in the hours, 600 or 700 hours of training, it really helps,” she said. “I know what I’m feeling now when I’m on skis. I know what my body needs to do, so now it’s a lot more natural.
“And now that I know these courses (in Canmore, Alta.) really well — kind of like the back of my hand since I have skied them so many times — it takes the nervous energy away and makes me a little more confident in my ability here. It will help me to really just race, kind of turn my brain off and just give it.”
Para-Nordic national team veteran Brian McKeever said Young’s high-performance background served her well whenever she attempted what were completely foreign movements on skis.
“Emily had competed at a high level with endurance sport, with triathlon, and had some exercise physiology education. You have the tools you were given, what you do with it is all you,” McKeever said.
In typical fashion, Young put everything she had into it, and has been on a fast track to success since the summer of 2014.
dbarnes@postmedia.com