Jeff Glasbrenner had made it to mile 25 in the 2013 Boston Marathon. Up ahead were family and friends waiting for him near the finish line. But some problems with his $25,000 prosthetic leg finally caused him to stop and make an adjustment. “Usually, when that happens. I just power through it,” he told the audience at the Little Rock Rotary Club weekly luncheon, “and especially when I’m that close to the finish.”
But this time it was really hurting, so he stopped to readjust it. That normally takes him about two minutes. So he did what was necessary to continue on the final mile. It turned out to be an important two minutes in the young athlete’s life, perhaps even saving him from serious injury. “If I had not stopped for those two minutes, I would have been at the finish line when the explosion went off,” he said.
“I plan to be there again next year,” Glasbrenner said, “with 100 of my amputee buddies, when we all cross that finish line together.” That is the challenge Glasbrenner is making to other disabled athletes like himself. “We want to show that no matter what is in front of us that we can get to that finish line,” he said.
Glasbrenner has crossed the finish line first many times in his life as a world-class athlete. But there have been bad days, too. One of the worst he says was on July 30, 1980. He was an eight-year old boy living on the family farm in Wisconsin. Like most boys that age, he looked up to his father. “Whatever dad set out to do, I was always close behind,” he remembered. “On this particular day, we were headed out to cut some hay.”
They began the cutting, and as so often happens in that part of Wisconsin, they soon hit a rock. That’s when the father’s helper came in. Young Glasbrenner’s safe spot was behind the tractor, and whenever they hit a rock, he was to walk behind it, remove the rock and any extra alfalfa that had bunched together, and then return to his safe spot. But this time, before he got all the way back, his dad turned on the machine.
“In a split second,” he said, “my life had changed forever.” His pant leg had become entangled in the power take off, which “spins very fast, very powerfully, and very unforgiving.”
He remembers it as though it was yesterday, laying there on the ground and being confused about what had just happened. He remembers looking down where his leg had been and seeing the bone sticking out. And he remembers looking to the right and seeing something familiar about ten feet away. It was his shoe, and his foot was still in it. His dad moved fast, picked the boy up and applied a hand tourniquet, which doctors later said probably saved his life.
The other thing he remembered from the day was crying, not from the pain but because he feared a life where he couldn’t run or swim – his two loves.
Glasbrenner says that when anything happens to us, we have a choice on how we deal with it. We can turn it into a positive, or into a negative.
He readily admits the positive thoughts were hard to come by for him in the beginning. He began thinking about all the opportunities he would never have. He says after a long period of living in the pity party, it was his mom who helped him move forward. “I remember laying on the couch one day,” he said, “flipping through the channels we had back then, both of them. I yelled at my mom to please bring me a Coke. She did, and as she handed it down to me, she said, ‘That’s the last one.’”
Glasbrenner asked her what she meant. She told him that henceforth, if he wanted a Coke or anything else, he would need to figure out a way to get it himself. Tough love, to be sure, but Glasbrenner says it was the making of him.
In school, there were other challenges, not the least of which was the best athlete just happened to be his sister. “I was always her biggest fan, but it was difficult sitting on the sidelines,” he said.
His opportunity to compete finally came when he attended the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. It was there where he got involved in wheelchair basketball. After much success in the sport, he was invited to the national tryouts in 1997. One hundred invitations went out for just 12 available spots. When the final selections were posted, Glasbrenner’s name was at the top of the list; he’s been on the national team ever since.
In 1998, his team went to the World Championship in Sydney, Australia, and came away with the gold medal. Today, he holds the National Championship scoring record of 63 points and 27 rebounds in one game.
Glasbrenner also is a three-time Paralympian and a two-time World Champion (Gold Medal). He has completed 20 Ironman triathlons, and has won numerous races in his division.
The thing to which he attributes his success both on and off the court is a positive attitude. “Life will give you bad days,” he said. “It’s how you handle them that define you as a person.
“I believe everything happens for a reason. My bad day truly was a bad day, but it turned out to be one of the greatest days of my life. Because so many positives would never have happened if not for that day.”