Fighting for the right to do it all
Woman says she’s ‘constantly advocating’
When it comes to good climbing form, Chelsea Donelon simply doesn’t have it. Her legs dangle and her knees rub so much on the wall’s surface that she had to buy a pair of mountain-biking knee pads for the way up.
The first time? “My knees gashed open, but in fairness, they were already gashed open,” Donelon says.
This last climb? “It was super good,” the 23-year-old said. “Somebody bled on the wall, but it wasn’t me.”
That’s something, considering Donelon pulled herself all the way up the University of Alberta climbing wall using just her arms. Most people rely on their leg muscles to do the heavy work, but Donelon is a paraplegic who lost the use of her legs after a car crash in August 2007.
That crash killed Donelon’s mother and two grandparents, and stole the then-15year-old’s dream of being an Olympic ski racer. Her spine broke, as did both wrists, her left elbow, her right collarbone, her left femur and both ankles, with one being completely crushed.
But Donelon doesn’t want to be known as the woman in the wheelchair, even though she has conquered her physical disability by pushing beyond it. She learned to swim again in high school, she went scuba diving in Mexico’s Cozumel and the Cayman Islands, she’s done tennis, body-boarding, Pilates, horseback riding and, more recently, rowing.
She loves adrenalin, competition and physical challenges, no different than before the accident. “I want people to know I’m amazing, but not because I’m in a wheelchair,” Donelon says. “I want to change that narrative of being an inspiration — because I’m not. I shouldn’t be an inspiration for doing anything that isn’t a stand-alone inspirational act.”
She says wall climbing isn’t that much more difficult for her than for others. She and her belay partner, Catherine Sauve, use a climbing-rope system that loops one extra time from the top of the wall, taking a third of Donelon’s body weight away from her arms. Instead of using a figure-eight knotting system, she uses a different belay device so she doesn’t end up pulling the knot too tight during the extra time she spends hanging as she ascends.
Donelon has been climbing since February and says she’s noticed her arms are stronger.
“I’m bulking up a little bit too much, which I don’t like, but that’s OK,” Donelon says. “You naturally get strong when you wheel around everywhere.”
She’s strong in a different way, too, after having to fight for access to the climbing wall, among other battles.
“It’s exhausting, as a person with a disability, to be constantly advocating,” Donelon says. “I advocated for Strathcona School to get a lift so I could go to drama class and math class. I advocated to be able to get into a lecture hall at this university when I was here. I advocated at a university in England to be able to get into the library there. I’ve advocated at every step of anywhere I go because there is something I can’t do because they didn’t build it.
“I don’t want to do that. I have better things to do.”
Yet the new Wilson Climbing Centre doesn’t have an elevator to reach the second floor, where the much higher climbing wall is visible from the exterior windows. To get to the lower level climbing walls, Donelon has to take a convoluted route using ramps and a separate elevator in the attached student gym. The second floor of the gym doesn’t connect to the second floor of the climbing wall.
“It really bothers me because it assumes people with disabilities aren’t going to be doing this,” Donelon says, massaging her hands, sore from climbing. “We need to stop assuming that people with disabilities aren’t going to be doing things everyone else is doing, whether that’s being a CEO and having a successful office or climbing or anything.”
She wants stronger building codes that automatically make every space accessible, where the assumption is every person is capable of doing every activity.
Cheryl Harwardt, operations director for the U of A’s faculty of physical education and recreation, says when the price tag of the Wilson Climbing Centre jumped to $72 million from $60 million, some compromises had to be made and the planned elevator was taken out. However, the university is currently exploring the option of increasing the height of the lower climbing wall. Currently at around six metres, it could be built up to a height of 24 metres, or near double the second-floor climbing wall, which reaches to 13 metres, Harwardt said.
“It would be a great challenge, not just for Chelsea, but for everyone,” Harwardt says. She doesn’t know how many people with disabilities use the facility, but children in wheelchairs, with autism or with difficulty walking visit the wall from the Free2BMe program at the Steadward Centre for Personal and Physical Achievement.
Cost shouldn’t determine whether a building is made accessible, Donelon says.
While she currently works on policy for the Premier’s Council on the Status of Persons with Disability, Donelon doesn’t want to be pigeonholed into that line of work.
“Chelsea is very determined and she has a beautiful way of not letting expectations stop her,” Sauve says.
“I can see very much a go-getter in her personality. She’s so good at encouraging other people around her as well.”
Donelon has a politics and international relations degree from Royal Holloway, University of London and wants to work in international development.
“I want to be an inspiration for doing something that is meaningful and amazing in the world, not because I did something that anyone else can do,” Donelon says. “I want people to forget (I’m in a wheelchair) because I forget. … I just want to be epic. I don’t know what that’s going to look like.”