In the movie of his life, Scott Rigsby would cast Mark Wahlberg in the title role.
Scratch that. In the movie of his life, Scott Rigsby will cast Mark Wahlberg in the title role.
After all, dreaming big is what Rigsby does. In 2007 at age 39, he became the first person with prosthetic legs to swim the 2.4 miles, bike the 112 miles and run the 26.2 miles of the Ironman World Championship in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.
“We all have our ‘unthinkable.’ It’s just that we need to find that and get the right people around us to make that thing happen,” Rigsby said at an American News Women’s Club event in the District of Columbia last week. He’s working to turn his book, “UnThinkable,” into a movie.
Here’s a preview of his story — and the lessons athletes of any level can learn from it:
1. Have a Dream.
At 18 years old, Scott Rigsby had the same dream most young men from his small, rural hometown of Camilla, Georgia had: “To go to college, meet a pretty girl, meet another pretty girl, meet another pretty girl, marry one of those pretty girls,” have a family and live happily ever after, he says.
But that dream was shattered when an 18-wheeler hit the trailer behind Rigsby and his friends, who were riding in the back of a pickup truck. Rigsby was thrown over the side, dragged down the highway and eventually pinned under the trailer.
“My life radically changed in nine seconds, because that’s how long it takes for a person to be dragged 324 feet on the pavement going 45 miles an hour,” says Rigsby, whose right leg was amputated immediately.
Twenty years and another leg amputation later, Rigsby had a new dream: To complete the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii. “If I could accomplish this, I could redefine the limits for amputees,” he writes in his book.
2. Dream Big.
Most health experts will tell you to make small, manageable changes to meet your goals. They’ll tell you to make those goals realistic so you don’t set yourself up for failure. Not Rigsby.
When he set his goal to complete the 2007 Ironman World Championship, Rigsby had never swum with artificial legs, and he didn’t own a bike. He hadn’t run 0.2 miles with his prosthetics, let alone 26.2. “So, to recap: I was too old, too fat, too tired and too broke,” he writes in his book.
Even his dad was discouraging, telling Rigsby he should have pursued this dream 20 years ago, when he was in his athletic prime. Rigsby knew he was right. “We can’t change our past, but we can do something about today that can impact our tomorrow,” he says. “So what I could do was focus on what I could do, not the laundry list of what I could not do.”
3. Ask, “What Can I Control?”
In the years between Rigsby’s accident and his Ironman dream, Rigsby was suicidal, addicted to prescription drugs and struggling to hold down a job. “I felt like Rip Van Winkle, and I had fallen asleep and woken up one day and somebody had told me about his terrible dream that I had slept through my 20s,” he says.
One turning point? When a doctor told Rigsby he could amputate his left leg, which had literally and figuratively been weighing him down. “It was just simply a doctor telling me, ‘You have a choice,'” he recalls.
That mantra proved to be crucial years later, when Rigsby hit a strong headwind at mile 80 of the Ironman’s biking portion. After 10 more miles with little progress, he wanted to quit.
But then, he says, “I realized that I had had my focus wrong: I had been trying to focus on things that I could never control — the wind and the heat.” So he turned his focus to something he could control — his heart rate — by shifting the gears. Rigsby was back in the race.
“If we could find one thing that we can focus in on, it will totally change our perspective, it will change our day, it will change our week, it will change our year,” he says.
4. Do It for Others.
Rigsby was only about 3 miles from the Ironman finish line when he hit another low. Sweat was pooling inside the liners of his prosthetics, but if he took the time to take them off, dump them out and replace the liners — as he’d done throughout the race up until then — he wouldn’t make the race’s 17-hour cutoff. The prosthetics, he says, began “to rip the flesh off my legs, every agonizing step.”
“How do you push through that kind of pain when you’re that close to your finish line?” he asks. “You won’t. You’ll give up, you’ll quit — if you’re not playing a role in a bigger story.”
But Rigsby was. He was doing it for wounded military members whom he hoped to inspire with his story. He was doing it to pave the way for other amputees. He was doing it for his older brother, who was born with a form of mental retardation. “He would love to feel that kind of pain, he would love to know that his legs work,” Rigsby says.
So Rigsby put one carbon foot in front of the other for 3 more excruciating miles. Sixteen hours, 42 minutes and 42 seconds after he began, Rigsby crossed the finish line.
“When all that’s at stake is us, we give up — but not if we’re in the service of others,” he says. “We will go through hell and back for our friends, for our family, for our loved ones. When it’s not about us.”
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How to Achieve Your ‘Unthinkable’ Fitness (and Other) Goals originally appeared on usnews.com
