Gifford keeps his Midmar love affair afloat
● Double amputee Chad Gifford is taking it easy at the Midmar Mile, swimming just once this weekend instead of the eight milers he’s done on five previous occasions.
The 52-year-old swimming coach, who lives with his mother near Port Shepstone, KwaZulu-Natal, has become a regular face at the open-water event, torpedoing across the water and on land on his so-called skateboard, a remodelled gurney.
Gifford, boasting a best time of 30 minutes, completed the handicap event in difficult conditions yesterday. The elite races are set for today.
He still recalls his first swim in 2009, when he discovered just how tough it could be starting at the front, getting stepped on three times by other entrants charging into the dam.
The first one pushed him under water. “Someone had actually just used me as a diving platform. I came up and as I took air, somebody else pushed me under again. I was like ‘I’m going to drown here’.
“So I came up again and somebody else stood on me and jumped off. I thought to myself ‘I’m not even that brown, how am I mistaken for a piece of driftwood or something like that?’ I actually had three bruises on my back.”
Ironically, Gifford’s love affair with the Midmar — which he rates as the best openwater event he’s done — began by accident. He had just started the sport after taking part in a disabled race and told his doctor he wanted to swim in the Open A category.
The doctor thought he meant open water. “So he challenged me to do Midmar, so I was like: ‘what the hell is Midmar?’”
But since the doctor had already entered him into Midmar, he decided to give it a go anyway.
Before that Gifford had endured a lengthy journey since being paralysed from the waist down in a road crash in 1991. Pressure sores caused septisemia which nearly resulted in death — he remembers the heart monitor flat-lining — and that led to one leg being amputated in 1993.
The second leg was removed in 2000. Gifford said he was never one to wallow in pity, but said the first five years were tough. “Mentally, it drains you because you’re thinking ‘okay, I can just go live my life’, and then you realise ‘okay, I must move my legs to get in and out of bed and out of the bath and into a car, and all of this because these damn things don’t move anymore’.
“Sometimes you get frustrated … It’s like being born again.”
He started swimming after the second amputation. “I jumped in the pool and my pants came off because there was nothing to hold onto so I had to tighten them.”
And that was the start of an incredible aquatic journey.