The Secret of Support
Michael Jacques / 13.01.2012
For 30 years the Speight’s Coast to Coast has led the way in adventure sports, bringing together endurance junkies of all age and ability from across the globe. This year a Christchurch woman hopes to be the first legally blind person to finish the 243k race across the South Island.
Neelusha Memon doesn’t remember much about the turn of the new Millennium. In one week during the year 2000 she went from snowboarding at Cadrona to fighting for her life as a post-viral auto-immune disease put her in a coma for four months. For a year, the hospital was her home, after which she went home for real with just 30 percent sight and major coordination problems.
Eleven years later Neelusha Memon wants to be the first legally blind person to finish the Speight’s Coast to Coast. Asked why, she shrugs and says, “I’ve always wanted to do it, even before I became injured.”
That sums up Neelusha Memon’s life since 2000. From having to learn to walk, talk and eat again, to taking on challenges even able-bodied people struggle to meet, the 27 year old is going about life as she always wanted to. She has climbed Mt Aspiring, heli-skied across the Tasman Glacier and ridden at the Paracycling World Championships in France.
Through all this, however, the biggest barriers she faced were often less to do with her own disability and more to do with the support available to her.
“When I started the recovery process,” says Memon, “I spent five years just grieving for what I’d lost. I had to relearn everything; walking, talking, eating. But as I started making progress and learning to live with it I noticed that the biggest stumbling block was the perception that a person with my disabilities couldn’t achieve these goals.”
“It’s something I really started thinking about when I was preparing to climb Mt Aspiring. People supported my enthusiasm but couldn’t grasp that someone like me could do it. They were asking if I’ve bitten off more than I could chew. I rang my mentor Gavin and said, ‘everyone is talking me down; have I set my sights too high.’ Gavin said, ‘Neelusha, just don’t talk to anyone who can’t support your goals.’”
It’s this problem that Memon highlights as a far bigger handicap than her own physical disability, which makes February’s Speight’s Coast to Coast, where every participant requires a committed support crew, a perfect place to highlight that no one does anything without some form of support.
With her paracycling experience, cycling is almost second nature to Memon now. Kayaking, she says, has proven to need more organising but the actual sport itself isn’t too bad.</p>
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