Title:
A Champion’s Mindset | Roderick Sewell on Resilience and Success
Subtitle:
The Author of ‘Iron Will’ Opens Up About His Paralympic Journey
Transcript:
Alycia Anderson: Welcome to Pushing Forward with Alycia, a podcast that gives disability a voice. Each week we will explore topics like confidence, ambition, resilience, and finding success against all odds. We are creating a collective community that believes that all things are possible for all people. Open hearts, clear paths.
Let’s go.
Welcome back to Pushing Forward with Alycia. I am Alycia. And today we have one of the world’s biggest making history representing Team USA. Also competing in the Iron Man World Championship in Kona, Hawaii. He was the first bilateral above-knee amputee to do this, so making history, just wrote a book, all of the good things to document his amazing journey. He came from a challenging start of living in shelters to literally making it to the world’s biggest stages. I’m so excited to have you on our show.
Welcome to the show, Roderick Sewell.
Roderick Sewell: Yes. Thank you for having me.
Alycia Anderson: It is a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for wanting to come on the show. Your story is absolutely amazing and inspiring, and I think before we jump into all of the amazing milestones that you have achieved in your life, can we look back a little bit and share with our community just a little bit about your disability, whatever you’re comfortable with, and also your earliest memory of movement or sport.
Roderick Sewell: For sure. So I was born with missing tibias in both of my legs. I had my amputation at a year and a half. And I’ve got my first pair of prosthetics when I was two years old. So for me at this point, I’m 33 now. Putting on prosthetics is like putting on shoes, it’s not anything fancy or different.
But because I had my amputation at a early age, my first real memories were with my amputation, at being a double above-knee amputee. So I don’t remember my limbs, but as soon as my amputation was happening, and then the healing process, and I don’t know if it’s the pain relation to it, but my mind was able to retain some of those times, some of those situations.
So as time went on, I’m thinking I’m normal, just like everybody else. I’m just a little different. I’m wondering why I am shorter than all the babies. And as time went on, I had to find my own modes of transportation. Aside from the prosthetics, I never had an in-home chair to use. I had a walker for a while, and after that it became, just be creative. I really got around on a skateboard for a long time. That was my thing. And doing that and using my arms to maneuver on the skateboard really built my confidence and built my strength up in a way that I didn’t realize.
As time went on, I got introduced to the Challenge Athletes Foundation, and we call them CAF. CAF is a nonprofit, whose goal is to reach out to people with disabilities and give them the equipment, or gear, or just coaching they need to live a healthy lifestyle. It’s been around for over 30 years now, and literally my life wouldn’t be the way it is without CAF.
Just to give everybody kind of a rundown, my insurance covers my walking prosthetics. My insurance will not cover my running legs. And I brought one just to show in the camera. There’s dust on there ’cause I don’t run much anymore. These are considered luxury by the insurance companies.
So, because of that, they won’t cover the running foot. And CAF does a really good job of raising money for people like me to get this equipment so that they can go and be healthy. Because if I’m not active, if I’m not moving, then my health is gonna get worse. And me with a disability, my health getting worse, it’s gonna be downhill.
Alycia Anderson: You know what’s so interesting about what you just said is insurance companies classify running for disabled people as a luxury. But it’s just a typical lived experience if you don’t have a disability. It’s so interesting.
Roderick Sewell: Exactly.
Alycia Anderson: I love the fact that you’re involved with CAF.
I grew up in Southern California myself as well. I believe
Roderick Sewell: Oh
Alycia Anderson: you’re from San Diego. Is that true?
Roderick Sewell: I’m from San Diego. Yeah.
Alycia Anderson: You’re from San Diego? Yeah, so I remember the early days of CAF, and they have literally changed so many athletes’ lives and with the equipment that they offer all of us. So that’s really cool.
Yeah, because I didn’t know about the adaptive world, seeing that and being exposed to that. I met CAF around, I think I was seven or eight years old, so this had to be like 1999, maybe 2000, and just mind blown to the options of what we could do.
Roderick Sewell: Wheelchair basketball, I took to that. Hand cycle. I definitely took to that, that was for me. A lot of these different sports. And then the last one was swimming because I was afraid of the pool. I was afraid of the water. And I got to meet another double above-knee amputee. His name’s Rudy Garcia-Tolson, and seen him swim and learned that I can do this, even though I have this disability. For so long, even though it wasn’t necessarily told by someone to me, it was just something that I built this mindset where for sure there’s no way, because I don’t know how it must not be possible. And seeing it done made it known to me that it very much is possible.
So it became, “Now who can help me overcome this fear?” Challenge Athletes Foundation have the coaches that can help you and get you in that comfortable position, so that you can feel free in the water. And it’s crazy how facing your fears can literally change your life. That’s the best way I can say it.
Alycia Anderson: Facing your fears can change your life. Yes. And talk about swimming for a minute, because I know for me too, as a disabled person, it’s the one place that I can go and leave everything behind and just be with my body. Talk about that for a minute.
Roderick Sewell: Yeah, I didn’t know how freeing it would be. And I talk about this a lot lately with the book being out. Without my prosthetics, I was the most comfortable, I felt the most content, I felt the most secure. Being four feet tall, regardless I loved my body from head to stump. But put my prosthetics on now, and growing up that way after being so accustomed to living my life as I was, now I’m working with this equipment that’s a little clunky.
That’s a little unnerving sometimes that I think one thing and my knee is doing another thing. It took some time to grow and be comfortable with it, and swimming was like that bridge where, if you need a moment without your legs again to do something where you would move a lot faster in your natural form.
Here you go. This is it. And so it was just like a double whammy of I need to learn how to swim, I have this water safety. Oh, I’m confident now because I know how to swim. And then it was, “Oh wow. Like this is such a fun sport. Like this is such a fun thing to do.” By the time I learned how to swim, I was almost 10 years old.
I feel like I missed out on 10 years of swimming.
And I was just trying to catch up on it. So I went from never being in the water to always in the water. I trained with my coach, who taught me how to swim, Alan Boycard, and Alice and Terry. And it got to the point where I wanted to go to the Paralympics.
Seeing Rudy, another double above-knee amputee do the same thing. I knew that it was something that I could do. Not around that time. My mom and I were still struggling. It was around the time where I was 16 that I dedicated myself to Paralympic swimming.
Alycia Anderson: So, let’s talk about your mom for a minute, ’cause I know I wanna lead up to Paralympics. I know she’s been a huge support in your life. I know you two have overcome a lot together. Can you talk a little bit about your history and how supported you through this journey and how that led up to the games and which games you went to?
Roderick Sewell: For sure. Yeah, seeing her, just her drive, her almost willingness to never quit. It could be hard, it could be hard on her alone ’cause she’s a single mother going through this. She’s having people tell her, you need to give your child to somebody else because obviously you’re going through this situation.
She hears this and now chooses to make this all a secret because she doesn’t wanna lose the one thing she’s working so hard for. And it’s seeing how willing she was to just do whatever she could to make sure I got the basic needs, like walking and running. And this is one thing I didn’t realize until I took a trip to Ethiopia and Kenya with a nonprofit called Limb Kind Foundation.
And they were making prosthetics for kids out there. And these kids have never had prosthetics. And hearing that, for somebody whose mom was working for the Navy making good money, not receiving durable medical equipment with her insurance, has a child who needs that durable medical equipment.
She now quits her job to file for unemployment, to get that Medicaid, to get that assistance, and her doing this made it so that I can say that I’ve been on prosthetics my entire life. I’ve never been without, I’ve never had to, and I say this because I have a lot of friends who are amputees, especially who were injured later in life that have a wheelchair at home, as well as their prosthetic. When they’re out and about, they might use their prosthetic. When they’re at home, they might use their chair. Because I got started with the early age from what she did, I haven’t known anything else but my prosthetics, maybe a skateboard. And I realized going to these other countries, that truly is a privilege.
Being from somebody who grew up homeless, it was mind blowing to me that I could say that I had, still certain privileges that a lot of people did not have.
Alycia Anderson: And your mom had to quit her job to receive the benefits that she needed. That’s an incredible story alone right there. Like full stop.
Roderick Sewell: Yeah
Alycia Anderson: Wow. And that shows the real challenges that we have here with receiving the things that we need as disabled people, like why
could that even be a thing?
But it is. That’s unbelievable. Honestly.
Roderick Sewell: And there’s so many resources being cut now. I’ve had this discussion with my mom, with a lot of people who read the book. The first question they asked me, “If somebody was to do this today, do you think they’d be as successful as your mom was back then?” Immediately I was hurt, ’cause the first thought that came to my mind was absolutely not. The resources that I had, I’ve already gotten emails that a lot of these things have been cut. A lot of these programs are gone.
It’s unfortunate. It’s tough because I feel like my story can be a light to somebody going through something now, especially people who are, from what I notice, parents who are raising children with similar conditions. That’s a tough subject.
The thought of, “Can you sacrifice everything you’ve worked hard for?” A lot of people have gone to school, going to get these degrees, and get these jobs. Can you give all that up so that your child can get a step ahead, or a step up before they’re three. And a lot of parents came back saying that this would be tough.
Alycia Anderson: Yeah.
Roderick Sewell: You know, I’ve had people in my family say, “Absolutely not.” And they’re talking about my relatives, so it’s why I pay homage to her when I can every time. And I feel like it’s just so much. It’s the power of the woman. It’s the power of the single mother.
It’s the power of that drive, like she wasn’t given a lot of love from her mother or father. She wasn’t given a lot of love from her husband, my dad. And still, she did miraculous things with the level of love that she knew.
Alycia Anderson: The power of the woman. I love that.
My husband’s mom was the same with him. All of our moms, most of our moms, a lot of our moms advocated for things for us that we needed way before we knew how to have a voice of advocacy.
So cool. It’s giving me the chills right now. Up my back.
Roderick Sewell: I love it.
Alycia Anderson: It’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful. We should have had her on too. So how does going from all of these struggles in your youth, homelessness, shelters, fighting for equipment that you need in your space. How does that fuel you to get to Paralympic games, to train and get to this elite level, and break barriers like the Iron Man competition?
Where does that come from?
Roderick Sewell: Originally, getting started with CAF and being young and learning about this adaptive world, we talk about our parents and how they advocated for us. Before me, my mom, I feel like she never saw any MPC, or she never thought about, but once she had a child. Now if she sees something wrong, even if somebody else, she immediately spoke up.
So it’s like that. Before we could defend ourselves, we had that advocate standing there with us.
Alycia Anderson: You are struggling with homelessness, you are struggling with becoming one with your equipment, finding the right resources, all of those things to reaching elite level, going to the Paralympic games, breaking barriers in Iron Man competitions. Tell us how beginning stage translates to the motivation into what you’re doing today.
Roderick Sewell: I think the beginning was we just wanted a way out. And I’ve talked to Rudy about this at first. Rudy was a big superstar with CAF. He was the child star. And he grew up pretty much with Challenge Athletes Foundation. And then I came in, and Rudy would see my situation where we were living in shelters.
We were catching the bus to most CAF events. And he told me, like when we were younger, he would feel bad for me. And I told him the CAF events and meeting him was a light at a end of the tunnel that I needed because it was just downhill from when my mom quit her job, to when we had to give up the house and the car, and now we’re living in shelters, and now we’re staying in our second shelter, with women and children.
And then here comes CAF, where we have sports specifically for you. And that’s at seven, eight years old. I’m ready to do everything at this point. So it became just the fun of it. And then you learn about Paralympics, and then it’s, ” Oh, can I do that too?” And I remember I was just still having fun because we were still unstable with our living situation.
Around the time where I moved to Alabama, I was 12 years old. For four years there we were getting stable, I was getting my grades up, and from then, once we were okay, then I can get back into adaptive sports. So I took a good break from maybe 13 to 15 years old, where I got big, I was eating southern food.
So I was enjoying the lifestyle down there. But then when I started training again, it was at the Lake Shore Foundation. It was between wheelchair basketball, sometimes cycling, sometimes swimming.
Alycia Anderson: I got a grant to go to the 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing, from the Paralympic Academy at the Olympic and Paralympic Training Center, and I got to watch Rudy compete in the 200 IM swim. Seeing him get gold in his main event, now at 16, I decided this is it. At the time, it was wheelchair basketball or swimming. But seeing that, I was like, “Okay, let me do swimming.” For me, basketball felt like a high school thing, if that made sense. It felt like something that once I graduated, I wasn’t gonna do anymore.
Roderick Sewell: But swimming felt like wherever I go, I can take this and I can use it somewhere. Wheelchair basketball wasn’t as big as it is now, where you can go almost anywhere and find a team. So the stepping stones were just like, “Lemme see what I can do. Let me have fun. Oh, this is fun. I’m actually good.”
These are the two sports I’m good at. And then now going to see what it takes to become a Paralympian. I know I need to drop this sport, keep my grades up, and focus on this one. So, at 16 is when I committed. And then it took four years
to qualify for my first national team.
Alycia Anderson: Wow.
Roderick Sewell: I got gold and bronze in the Pan Pac championships,
Alycia Anderson: Nice.
Roderick Sewell: Pan Pacific Championships. And then 2015, I got bronze in the hundred meter breaststroke. Same event. And then I went to Worlds in 2017 in Mexico City, which was fun.
And I got bronze in the relay. But I got seventh in my main event. So at that point, I told myself, ” Tokyo is my last attempt for games.” I went to trials for London, and what year was it? 2012. I went to trials for Brazil in 2016, and then I told myself, “Tokyo will be it.”
As we know, Tokyo 2020 came through, COVID happened, pushed Tokyo 2020 to 2021. That threw off my training completely, but I was okay with it because I was able to do the Iron Man in 2019, and the Iron Man was the life-changing event for me.
Alycia Anderson: Okay, so talk about it.
We’re talking, what, 140 miles biking and running?
Roderick Sewell: It’s a 2.4-mile swim, and I have it all in my book here, Iron Will available now. It’s a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and then a 26.2-mile run, which, when I was training for it, that was my mental barrier. I don’t understand how you could do all that and then do a marathon, when a marathon by itself is actually really hard.
But yeah, it was a life-changing experience. CAF, being an athlete for them, they told me there could be a slot and if I was training, would this be something I wanted to do? I was a really strong swimmer and a strong runner. It was just a bike that I needed help on. Once I got the bike, CAF made sure I was covered in that.
I started training. I had three months to get ready, which most people will tell you need more than three months to train for Iron Man. But I had been swimming. Swimming was such an active recovery thing. I could swim two miles any day of the week. I had been running around Central Park. I was living in New York at this time, so six miles to 12 miles I was okay with.
It was just a bike, so we figured just muscle it out for three months on the bike and you’ll be okay. Going into the Iron Man, representing as a CAF athlete.Got a slot from Iron Man as well. They wanna do an NBC special on me, and so I have them fly my mom out so she can watch the race. Her first vacation in years, she had her first massage, and my mom at the time was like 50-something.
Alycia Anderson: Wow.
Roderick Sewell: So I was like, “You really went 50-plus years and this is your first massage.” That’s wild to me. And then I was living at the training center, so I got ’em all the time. So I was just like, “What, your first one? Because it’s my hundredth.” But just having her there and her seeing me cross the finish line after a grueling day, finishing at, I think I did 16 hours and 26 minutes.
And 34 minutes away from missing the cutoff. And I think her being there, CAF’s co-founder, Bob Babbitt, was there, Rudy was there, as well as my handler. It was just a impactful time, where we can make a statement as people with disabilities that anything truly is possible.
I think a lot of excuses are used, but this example is one way to say that there is no excuse.
Alycia Anderson: This is incredible. So I wanna just clarify for somebody who is in the unknown of Iron Man. This is not an adaptive competition. This is able-bodied people competing, and you were the first bilateral above-knee amputee to compete alongside typical able-bodied, however you label ’em, people.
You swam, ran, and you cycled. Were you hand cycling or did you cycle with your prosthetics on?
Roderick Sewell: I used a kneeler hand cycle,
Alycia Anderson: Okay
Roderick Sewell: and I told Iron Man that there’s no way I’m doing a standard bike. Rudy told me how much he hated it. And so I told him like, “Yeah, I need to use a hand cycle ’cause I know my arms will get me through.” The swim was easy, and then once I got to the run, I’ll be done with arm stuff, so I can go onto the run and use my running blades.
Alycia Anderson: Well done. I am impressed.
Roderick Sewell: Thank you.
Alycia Anderson: That’s incredible. No, we all gotta get
your book. Like, wow. So tell me the impact of the representation. You look like you wanna say something. Do you wanna say something first?
Roderick Sewell: Yeah. But I’ll just say crossing that finish line was almost unreal. As I saw it coming up on me, I didn’t do enough visualization to picture what that moment was gonna be like. So as it was coming, I almost had a tunnel vision of this is really here, this day is done.
And I wanted to confirm that I made that cutoff. So, once I got in, my mom’s crying, I’m sobbing. Bob is hugging me, Rudy’s hugging me, and it just made a wave throughout the CAF community and even my family. And it made a domino effect for me to get my story out there. I’ve had a lot of people tell me that my story has moved them in some way.
So I feel like doing this helped me make a mark of, “Alright, let me write about what I’ve been through now. Let me put this down for somebody else.” And COVID was the time that I decided to do it. So it’s been a five year process to get to this point, but the goal is to get this out, so that anybody who is going through their own trial or tribulation, whether it be visible or invisible, that they understand that there’s a spark within them. That they understand that a life is worth living regardless of what situation or circumstance you’re living in.
Alycia Anderson: Beautiful. So tell us how to get the book, what it’s called, where we can support you, all those things.
Roderick Sewell: Yeah, so you can follow me on Instagram, @rsewell92. The book is available on Amazon and Hashet. And yeah, feel free to reach out to me.
Alycia Anderson: We’ll leave all the notes in the show notes and the links to click on and buy, connect, all good stuff. We wrap up with the pushing forward moment, a mantra, something that you live by to motivate our listeners. Can you gift away any gifts today?
Roderick Sewell: That’s a good mantra. One that I’ve been living by lately because I’ve learned I can’t do things on my own. If you want to go fast, go alone, and if you want to go far, go together.
Alycia Anderson: Ooh. That’s really good.
I am so happy to meet you, we have to stay friends.
Roderick Sewell: Absolutely.
Alycia Anderson: Congratulations on being a total badass. Okay. Literal
Roderick Sewell: Thank you.
Alycia Anderson: Full stop. I can’t wait to read your book. I’m so stoked that we’ve met each other. Thank you for your time today. And I’m looking forward to lifting this episode up.
It’s gonna be a real fan favorite for sure. Congratulations.
Roderick Sewell: Thank you, Alycia. Thank you so much.
Alycia Anderson: To the stars, my friend. Okay, and I’m gonna wrap up the episode. Thank you to our community for tuning in again. We will see you next time. This has been Pushing Forward with Alycia, and that is how we roll on this podcast. We will see you next time.