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    From Polio to Ironman: Thoughts about Life and Overcoming
    From Polio to Ironman: Thoughts about Life and Overcoming
    From Polio to Ironman: Thoughts about Life and Overcoming
    Ebook52 pages37 minutes

    From Polio to Ironman: Thoughts about Life and Overcoming

    By Bjørn Rasmussen

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    About this ebook

    What do you do if your left leg is 1 inch shorter than your right leg and has only a fraction of the power of your right leg? According to Bjørn Rasmussen you train harder.

    Bjørn got polio (infantile paralysis) in 1941, when he was only a week old. The polio attack was so violent that the doctors asked for permission to let him die. "But my parents wanted me to live" says Bjørn. "Therefore I can write this book."

    This is a book about a boy who could barely walk up the stairs when he was in school, but later in life completed an Ironman - a triathlon - consisting of 3.8 km swimming, 180 km cycling and a marathon of 42 km.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBooks on Demand
    Release dateDec 14, 2012
    ISBN9788771149135
    From Polio to Ironman: Thoughts about Life and Overcoming

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      Book preview

      From Polio to Ironman - Bjørn Rasmussen

      Life

      Preface

      I have written this book for myself. After being employed for 44 years I recently retired in 2002 and am deciding how to best use my new freedom. I will spend my time doing what I like to do and I will try to be happy.

      This book is about surviving with polio, and I believe other polio survivors would like to read about my experiences to see that they, too, can live and thrive in spite of polio. My hope is that this book can help them to be happier and more content with life.

      This book is also about making wishes come true. If you really want to be stronger, or more successful in life for that matter, you must believe in yourself. There are lots of obstacles—your own mind must not be one of them.

      My Childhood in Aarhus

      I was born December 18, 1941, during World War II. There was little food. My mother could not breast-feed me, so I was fed sugar water. It was very common to give babies sugar water at that time. My father, Ejnar, was a carpenter, and my mother, Ingeborg, was a bookbinder.

      I got polio the first month I was born. There was a polio epidemic at that time and I became very sick. My condition was so bad, my parents told me later, that the doctors recommended letting me die. But my parents wanted me to live, and that is why I can write this book. The polio struck my left hip and left leg—my right hip and leg were OK.

      I was at the hospital for a month. Then I came home to my parents. As far as I remember, there was no rehabilitation. How do you rehabilitate a baby? Once a year I went back to the hospital to see if my left leg was getting weaker. It was always the same, I think. The doctors didn’t tell me anything since I was only a child.

      The polio killed some of the nerves in my left hip and leg, leaving me with very little muscle power on my left side—only 10% compared to my right side.

      The lack of strength in my left leg became a problem when I was old enough to go to school. The school was three stories high with lots of stairs up and down. I didn’t like stairs. I had to use my strong right leg when I climbed the stairs—my weak left leg just dragged behind.

      I also discovered I was terrible in gymnastics. Because of the polio I couldn’t do the various jumps, and I was a very bad runner.

      I remember a sports day in fifth grade. There were four boys on each running team. The two strongest boys on my team dragged me the whole route. It was very hard and frustrating being a dead weight and hurting, rather than helping, my teammates. I knew they could have won without me.

      I was good at something, however. I was the best in my class at climbing a rope. Here I could use the muscles in my arms, and we weren’t

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