Candace Cable, Cross Country Skier, Jan/Feb 2006
Winter is forbidden territory for most disabled people. After an auto accident landed her in a wheelchair at age 21, Candace Cable figured she’d never again roam a snowy mountain landscape.
But one look at Cable’s muscular arms and shoulders and you know there’s no obstacle she can’t power over. Herculean upper-body strength is what it takes to become the world’s top adaptive cross-country skier, propelling the 50-year-old Californian to claim two Olympic medals, 12 Paralympics wins and the 2004 Overall World Cup Cross Country Skiing Championship—the first such victory for any North American woman, able or disabled.
Cable’s long career as a world-class athlete demanded more than just brawn. She also needed to design and build much of her own equipment. Since large sporting goods companies can’t profitably manufacture sophisticated gear for the tiny cross country sit-ski market, Cable works with individual designers like Michael Byxbe of Sierra Sit Skis to pioneer the equipment she needs. As with all Nordic gear, the challenge is to make the ski light without sacrificing control.
She experimented for a while with an articulated ski, the kind preferred by disabled alpine skiers because its ability to pivot on the snow offers good edge control. Unfortunately, the setup weighed too much for cross country travel. “And when you make it light, you make it expensive,” Cable explains, adding that high-tech materials like titanium and carbon fiber don’t come cheap. Now she’s back to a more primitive--but lightweight—rigid setup that can’t angulate when the snow slopes away under her. The result is a tendency for the equipment to to spill her on her head, as it did in 2005 on the banked switchbacks of Truckee’s 30-kilometer Great Race. But Cable is confident that as disabled cross country skiing grows, the technology will advance as well. “The future of the sport has to include more control, a safer ride, a more fun experience,” she says.
For Cable, classic kick-and-glide and skate techniques are both out of the question, though she admires the grace and beauty of skaters’ rhythmic strides. Instead, she relies instead on double-poling to glide over the snow, switching to alternate poling on steeps. Stopping on the way up requires planting a pole behind her--between her skis--and wedging the handle against her seat or “bucket”. “Removing the pole—well, that’s a question of good timing!” she jokes. The descents are just as tough as the climbs, because her 7-pound ski only brakes when she digs her pole tips into the snow. She’s snapped more than a few ski poles that way.
Over years of wheelchair road racing, Cable developed her legendary endurance dominating that sport by winning six Boston Marathons and the “Triple Crown” of road racing national championships--the 10k, half-marathon and marathon. Yet before her spinal cord injury, Cable wasn’t into athletics at all. “I was a high-heels girl,” she says. “For me, sweating was something you did on the dance floor!”
After rehabilitation therapy, she enrolled in Cal State University at Long Beach and fell in with a disabled athletes group. Seeing how sports gave her wheelie friends a way to feel able-bodied, Cable opted to try swimming. “It was great, because once I was in the water, no one could tell I was in a wheelchair,” she says. When she tried track, she had an epiphany during her first 10-kilometer race. “Suddenly, I felt like part of the whole again,” she recalls. “There I was, running along with everybody else, with the same goal as every other competitor out there. It was huge.” Afterwards, she threw herself full-force into road racing.
In 1988, a friend suggested Cable take her skills to the snow. “I had started to think that, as someone who uses a wheelchair, I’d spend my whole life on pavement,” Cable says. But then she tried adaptive alpine skiing at Tahoe. “I didn’t think sit-skiing would be as fun as skiing on your feet, but it was. I was hooked!” She spent four years on the US Disabled Alpine Ski Team before a coach suggested that, with her achievements in endurance sports, she should try cross country skiing. She discovered she could freely explore the mountains, the way she did before her injury. “It’s beyond any empowering experience I’ve ever had in any sport,” Cable says. “Cross-country skiing lets me go up and down things that make people say, ‘What are you doing out here?’ For someone with a disability, that’s huge. And when I get myself up to that panoramic view at the top of the climb, I love to remember how people said I couldn’t do this.”
Cable has proven time and again there’s little she can’t do. In addition to competing on the US Disabled Cross-Country Ski Team, in 2004 she became the first woman in a wheelchair to qualify and compete in the Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon World Championships. Cable completed the 2.4-mile ocean swim and handcycled for 90 of the 112-mile bike portion before the event’s time limit disqualified her. It was a thrilling experience for Cable, but it also compromised her 2005 ski season. “I finished the Ironman in October and didn’t have much time off before West Yellowstone in November,” she recalls. “I overtrained—and it totally took the wind out of my ski season,” she says.
This year, she’s rebounding, setting her sights on top finishes in Paralympic and national competitions. Developing teaching programs is also on her list: Cable created an educational video called “Introduction to Adaptive Sports” that explores how any sport can be adapted to fit individual needs, and she’s working with the Professional Ski Instructors of America to develop disabled cross-country ski instruction protocols. Cable is also an inspiring public speaker, and her company, Advancing Our Abilities, facilitates educational workshops, consultations, and motivational programs. “Able-bodied or disabled—we all face similar struggles as we try to realize our fullest potential,” she says. Setting life goals—and attaining them—is Cable’s passion, and with her athletic accomplishments she hopes to convince others that anything is possible.
For her own motivation, Cable looks to other cross country skiers. “Maybe it’s the intensity of the sport, but cross country skiing attracts the most outstanding people—a real quality group,” she says. “I find that very inspiring.”
