Dixon ready for her debut
Former state resident and UConn alumna to compete in paratriathlon
Amy Dixon began to lose her sight at age 22.
She’d endured treatment after treatment to slow down the rare form of uveitis that has robbed her of over 95% of her vision over the past 23 years. She’s gone through chemotherapy and steroids treatment on top of 35 different eye surgeries.
The former Sherman and Greenwich resident has suffered and survived through all the pain. The harsh, grueling, body-destroying pain she can never just quite get away from. But it’s this constant battle which has pushed, shaped and molded her strength to never give up.
So on December 3, 2020, when Dixon found herself fighting for her life in a hospital bed in an ICU in San Diego due to multiple pulmonary clots and a resulting infarction in her lungs, she again pushed through.
With the Paralympics just months away, there was no way she’d let this bout with pain end her dream of competing on the world stage.
She has never let it stop her before and she wasn’t going to let it now.
“I had so many unanswered questions as far as my ability was concerned after Rio [Dixon was an alternate at the 2016 Paralympics] that I wanted to go back for myself and answer those questions,” she said. “So yeah, I was determined to fight even if I had to crawl across the finish line to get there after everything that happened last December.
“It made the fire burn brighter. It made me hungrier to get back here.”
On June 27 at the Americas Triathlon Para Championships in Wisconsin, Dixon made her 2021 paratriathlon season debut and crossed the finish line in third place with a time of 1 hour, 25.06 minutes.
That helped solidify her spot on Team USA’s Paralympic roster for the sport’s PTVI division, which features athletes with visual impairments.
The years of pain, treatment, and struggle had all been worth it. She was going to the Paralympics.
“It took every ounce of my being to cross the finish line on June 27 at the Trials and that took hundreds of hours from my doctors, my coach, my support team around me to get me healthy enough to be there and let alone put together a race that would qualify me and we did,” said Dixon, who lives near San Diego in Encinitas, Calif.
While Dixon’s journey through losing her sight has brought immense pain, it’s opened her life to new passions and experiences. What she lost in her vision she gained in accomplishing dreams she never knew she had and despite her goals being postponed through the worst year of her life, she’s more motivated than ever to compete on the world’s biggest stage.
The 2020 Paralympics, which were postponed last summer because of the COVID-19 pandemic, begin with the Open Ceremony on Tuesday in Tokyo. Dixon will compete in the Games’ paratriathlon on Aug. 27.
“I’m just amazed and shocked,” Dixon said. “This past year it feels like I feel shell shocked at everything that’s happened and I’m so grateful to be able to be healthy enough to be on the starting line .”
‘PRETTY ROUGH NEWS TO TAKE’
Dixon, 45, grew up with 20/20 vision on a horse farm in Westchester, New York. Her childhood was spent training and riding horses, swimming, and being as active as any other young kid.
Her family moved to Sherman when she was 15. She began her sophomore year of high school at Brookfield High and graduated in 1994 before attending UConn, paying her way through college on the tips and wages she earned waitressing.
It was during her night shifts at the restaurant when she began realizing something was off. She began to bump into tables frequently, along with missing the glass completely when pouring wine.
After breaking a rib from a bad fall down the stairs, she realized she needed to see a doctor and made an appointment with a neurologist.
She was convinced everything was tied to her severe migraines, something she’s had since age 9 since she was beginning to randomly see white spots filtering in and out of her vision, which she knew was often a symptom of migraines.
Her doctor determined Dixon no longer had peripheral vision since she couldn’t see his hands when he purposefully held them to the side. “It just looked like his arms were cut off at the shoulders,” Dixon recalled.
She was immediately sent to an ophthalmologist who told Dixon she was suffering from a rare immune disease called uveitis, which causes the body to attack the retina and cause permanent scar tissue and blindness. The bad news got worse when they told Dixon there was nothing doctors could do and she would eventually lose her sight — and quickly, based on how fast the disease had already spread.
They estimated she’d be blind within a year.
“That was pretty rough news to take,” Dixon said. “I sorta marched out of their office and called them a couple choice words and continued about my business.”
Not soon after, Dixon was forced to meet reality. Driving home from the restaurant one night she struggled to see the road and accidentally drove off the street and into a ditch. She was fine and nobody was hurt, but she knew that she could no longer deny the disease. Her life was about to change, whether she wanted to believe it or not, and she needed help.
FINDING A PARATRIATHLON PASSION
Dixon learned to swim before she could walk and competed competitively from age 7 through high school.
But the thought of getting back into the pool scared her when a friend suggested she try swimming after chemotherapy and steroid treatment for her uveitis caused her to gain 75 pounds. She hadn’t swum in years and expected she’d fall further into a depression if she put on a swimsuit.
“I’m too fat. I’m embarrassed,” Dixon recalled telling herself.
Her friend didn’t take no for answer and showed up unannounced at Dixon’s house, refusing to leave until Dixon came with her to the Greenwich YMCA pool.
While she was mortified to join the gym’s Aquafit classes at first, the others in the class welcomed her. Soon, with her doctor’s approval, she began swimming laps.
It wasn’t until she participated in a 1-mile swim charity race surrounded by friends and family cheering her on that the competitor in her resurfaced.
“I had so much fun after that, I was like, ‘What else can I do?’”
Dixon began sneaking into empty spin rooms for solo sessions on the bike. She was still too embarrassed by how she looked to join spin classes and wasn’t sure how her guide dog, Elvis, would react to a crowded room with loud music. But once the spin instructor caught on to what Dixon was doing, she convinced her to join the class.
Still trying to lose the extra weight, Dixon also decided to run. Knowing she would have a hard time seeing the moving track of the treadmill, Dixon ran tied at the waist to the machine’s crossbar with an elastic Ther a Band.
It wasn’t long before someone convinced Dixon to try a triathlon since she was already training in all three sports. In 2013, she ran her first triathlon race in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y.
She fell in love.
“I had so much fun that I was immediately hooked,” she said. “It was such an accomplishment. The fact that I didn’t really feel different from anyone else. I felt like I was very able-bodied, and I was even passing people that had two good eyes on the course and I thought, ‘Wow, if I can do this with no sight, imagine what I could do if I actually trained consistently and really got better at this and really focused on it.’”
TRAINING FOR DELAYED GAMES
Dixon has trained for nearly a decade of her life for the chance to compete in the Paralympics. She’s competed in the U.S and internationally, winning seven World Triathlon gold medals, a world championship title, and three national titles, while being ranked as high as No. 4 in the world.
In 2016, she was an alternate for Team USA in the Rio Paralympics.
In paratriathlons, she competes with her guide, Kirsten Sass, tethered with a rope at their waists during the running and swim portions of the race, while riding on a tandem bicycle for the bike portion. Despite Sass being Dixon’s eyes during the race, Dixon must always cross the finish line first.
“What’s wonderful about that is triathlon is usually a very selfish solitary sport and now it becomes a team competition essentially,” Dixon said. “Where I’ve got a teammate of mine who is pushing me and cheerleading me on and helping pace me and talk me through dark moments and coach me and do all these things running right beside me.”
Initially, when the 2020 Summer Games got postponed until 2021 due to the pandemic, Dixon thought it would just be another year of training.
However, it turned into one of the worst years of her life.
Dixon’s disease came out of remission last September. It caused so much swelling in her body she dislocated her shoulder every night while she slept. Because of her rare form of Osteoporosis, every time her shoulder dislocated it simultaneously pulled off fragments from her collar bone.
The surgery to repair her shoulder took four and a half hours and resulted in multiple blood clots in her lungs. On December 3, she was rushed to the ICU and put on blood thinners.
Two days after being released from the hospital she had a pulmonary infarction and was brought back to the ICU. Her body gained 40 extra pounds of fluid due to a complication from the medicine.
“One thing after another kept happening and I was like, ‘Is this a sign that I’m too old for this? That I should retire? That my body is just telling me no?’ ” Dixon said.
But she couldn’t let go of her dream and all the whatifs. She was so close in 2016 and knew she couldn’t give up. So she committed herself to training unlike ever before.
Days were spent on her stationary bike and treadmill inside her garage, preparing her body to handle the heat and humidity of the Tokyo summer.
In June, the dedication paid off when she earned her spot on Team USA after finishing the Paralympic triathlon trials in third place.
While Dixon doesn’t expect to medal in Tokyo, she’s ready to compete. She knows after enduring a constant battle with pain for 20-plus years, she can withstand any competitor or poor weather conditions or any other obstacle.
She knows she’s ready. “Honestly, I’ve had 35 surgeries on my eyes, and I’ve had unbelievable excruciating pain associated with that and also with the surgeries that I had this last year, I had three surgeries this past year, and I lived on narcotic pain meds for months because of my shoulder,” Dixon said.
“I know that I can outlast and endure more pain than any of the girls that I’m racing against.”