Waking Hours

Mark Rohan (37) had a motorcycle accident which resulted in paralysis from the chest down. In 2012, he won two gold medals in the Paralympics. From Ballinahown, Westmeath, he runs The Bike Shed in Quinta do Lago, Portugal

Paralympic champion Mark Rohan

Two years ago, I moved to Portugal. I used to come here for winter training camps, and I always liked it. I remember thinking, ‘I love waking up to the sun shining’, and down here you have about 300 days of sunshine. I thought, ‘Why not do it? Why not wake up to the sun shining as often as possible?’ So I made the move. I’m up at 7am. I hop into the wheelchair and get dressed. I leave the clothes out from the night before. I have a shower before I go to bed.

I had a motorbike accident 17 years ago. I was going to a soccer match one Sunday morning and I crashed my motorcycle into a tree. I wasn’t going fast, it was just a bad patch in the road. If I’d been going at great speed, I would have died. A man called Jim Dockery was driving past. He saw the motorbike and then he went to look in the ditch. I’d been there for two hours, and I was never as cold in my life. I was blessed that he found me.

I had a lot of injuries, including four fractures in my back. But I pulled through. I spent seven months in hospital coming to terms with everything, physically and emotionally. I wasn’t depressed, because I had friends and family with me every night for seven months. Would you believe that? I was going out with a girl at the time and I thought, ‘I have to end it with her’. One day, a friend was allowed to wheel my bed out to get some fresh air. That was the turning point. The moment I was outside, I thought, ‘Let’s go, let’s get out of here’.

I’m paralysed from just below the arms. It’s quite a high injury.

Getting ready in the morning is second nature to me now. It’s not difficult. It’s all about finding a way of doing it, and then doing it. I suppose it’s like a kid tying their shoelace. In the beginning, you find it difficult, but once you master it, it’s easy. It might take me a minute longer than the average person to get dressed.

Most days, I have porridge with honey for breakfast. Then I wait until I get into work to have the coffee. I have an automatic car which has a portable hand-control system. A lot of people don’t know about them, especially newly injured people, who think they have to get these special cars. They don’t. I bought the controls online.

I originally came out here to start a cycling retreat — an Airbnb sort of thing. I bought an old orange farm up in the hills, but it was a 40-minute commute to work. Also, it was a freezing-cold 1952-era farmhouse. But now I’ve moved. Just this week, I got a lovely modern apartment with heating. I don’t know myself. It’s only 15 minutes from work.

I live in Loule — a nice historic, Moorish town. The people here are slow starters in the morning. In Ireland, you might have some people in work at 7.30am, but here most people would start at 9am, and then work until 6.30pm. They take an hour for lunch, and the majority of people will go to a restaurant for lunch.

I’m trying to learn the language at the moment. I think when you move somewhere, you have a responsibility to adapt and respect the culture; not that it’s a lot different, but still, it’s interesting. My girlfriend is from Lisbon. We take it in turns to travel, so that we see each other at the weekends. When I sit down with her parents for dinner, you think that they are having a massive fight. But they’re not. It’s just the way they communicate with each other. I think the Irish are reserved and they would be afraid to say anything, but the Portuguese have no problem speaking out. It’s all new for me, so it’s exciting.

I’m learning Portuguese, so I can say handy phrases like, ‘It’s not my fault’ and ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I stick on an audio book in the car on the way into work.

I work in Quinta do Lago, a golfing residential resort, which is linked to The Magnolia Hotel. We’ve just opened a high-performance sports campus here, and I’m the manager of The Bike Shed. Our core business is bike rental. Families rent mountain bikes to explore the Ria Formosa, a natural reserve along the beach, which is full of birds and wildlife. We also have different days for the levels of the cyclists.

We had one group who wanted to train for a triathlon. Some of them hadn’t been on a bike in 25 years, but they went on to do a triathlon here with us. Now we have another triathlon coming up in April. Other days, we have the more advanced cyclists. They don’t need as much, but we provide a guide for them as well. I usually go out cycling with them.

Initially, I took up hand-cycling as cross-training when I was playing wheelchair basketball. Then I loved it so much that I bought my own bike. I started to train really hard, and then success came. In 2012, I won the London Paralympics.

Sport and fitness are hugely important to me. I think if you’re in a wheelchair and you want to become independent, you have to be fit and strong. You can’t put on weight, because it’s harder on your joints. Because I’m fit, I’m able to live in a normal apartment, drive a car and I’m able to get into a bath. If I put on weight, I wouldn’t be able to do all of that, so exercise is huge. When I go on holidays with my girlfriend, we even go hiking together.

At night, when I go to bed, I don’t usually dream. But if I do, I’m never in a wheelchair.

“If you’re in a wheelchair and you want to be independent, you have to be fit”