Photo: Maclean family

The crazy way this paraplegic learned to walk again

By Reed Tucker

March 27, 2016
When the 9-ton truck slammed into John Maclean, it sent him clattering over and before coming to a rest, broken, beneath a highway guard rail. The bike he’d been riding laid off to one side.
Medics doubted Maclean would survive the 25-mile journey to the hospital near Sydney, Australia. A passing priest had administered last rites. When Maclean arrived at the ER, doctors — with a bit of gallows humor — referred to his probable condition as “mahogany or pine.”

The scene of Maclean’s accident.Photo: Maclean family

But there was no coffin for Maclean. Days later, as he woke in intensive care, his first words were: “How’s my bike?”
The words inspired his dad to believe that John might pull through. And he did, despite head and chest trauma, a broken arm and pelvis, a pulmonary contusion — and a broken back and partially-severed spinal cord.
Maclean was rendered an incomplete paraplegic, with no use of his right leg and only 25 percent of the left. His life, where sports meant everything, was over.
Or was it?
Now a pro wheelchair athlete, Maclean tells his remarkable story in the book “How Far Can You Go?: My 25-Year Quest To Walk Again,” out Tuesday.

John Maclean seen in the Hawaiian Ironman in 1997.Photo: Maclean family

“My goal as a little kid was to be a professional athlete,” Maclean tells The Post. As a young man, he signed a contract with the Penrith Panthers, a rugby club. When a friend suggested training for a triathlon, Maclean threw himself into it.
It was on June 27, 1988, while he was bike-training for his first race along Australia’s M4 highway, that he was clobbered from behind by a truck. He was just 22.
“There was a lot of pain — it was excruciating,” Maclean, now 49, says. “I did not recognize the ashen, emaciated figure staring back [in the hospital mirror].”
Several times a day, orderlies would flip him in his bed, ripping bits of skin stuck to the bedding. Maclean began rehabbing in a pool and on a gym mat, where a therapist forced him to try to crawl.
Four months after he was admitted, Maclean left the hospital, hobbling on crutches instead of in a wheelchair.
“Leaving upright gave me a great deal of hope,” he says. Still, simple tasks, such as learning to drive a car with hand controls vexed him. Everywhere he went in his wheelchair, strangers stared with a look of pity that Maclean despised.

If I could do the triathlon and complete the course, I’d see myself as equal to anyone else.”
 - John Maclean

He continued rehab, working out every day for two years. But he was still only able to limp on crutches, his left leg supporting a little weight as his right leg dragged behind.
Frustration finally took over and Maclean broke down in his father’s arms, crying “big, heartfelt tears.” He writes in the book that he got the sense his dad knew what he could not admit to himself: “I was never going to walk again.”
Instead, his father said something that would change his life: “Look how far you’ve come. Now, how far can you go?”
Maclean decided to embrace the future as a paralympic athlete using his wheelchair. He began competing in kayak races with a pal. His next goal was the Nepean Triathlon, which he’d been training for when he was injured. He complete it, in a chair, in 1994. Then he decided to tackle Hawaii’s Ironman World Championship.
“Before the accident, I saw myself as equal to anyone else,” Maclean says. “After, I didn’t. So in my mind, if I could do the triathlon and complete the course, I’d see myself as equal to anyone else.”
Maclean entered the race — which requires a grueling 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26-mile run — three times. He completed the course, though not in time, on his first two attempts; in 1997, he became the first paraplegic to finish under the able-bodied cutoff.

Maclean swimming the English Channel.Photo: Maclean family

He swam the English Channel, and participated in rowing and the 4×400-meter relay in the Paralympics.
Now he’s revisiting the challenge he set for himself some 25 years ago in the hospital: walking again.

Maclean found Ken Ware, an Australian trainer who uses a therapy called the “Ware K health trigger process.” The therapy, which Ware says is designed to recalibrate the nervous system and rid the body of stored emotion that inhibits progress, involves a patient closing his eyes and slowly lifting a small amount of weight. Soon, the body begins shaking violently, almost to the point of convulsing, and the patient is instructed to just let it happen.

Ware has experimented with the treatment since 1982, and has helped a patient regain use of badly broken legs and go on to win a powerlifting world championship, among other success stories.

A 2013 article in the medical journal Frontiers in Clinical and Translational Physiology postulated that the therapy works by literally shaking the body’s nervous system out of a pattern (in Maclean’s case, partial paralysis) and forcing it to re-organize in a more orderly fashion.

After just four days in the therapy, lifting the weights with his arms, Maclean’s nervous system was reset to the point that he could take his first tenuous steps.
“It was a very small shuffle,” Maclean says, “but a huge step from where I was.”
Ware said that because Maclean’s spinal cord had not been fully severed, impulses were still getting through to his legs, and the inability to control his limbs was partially mental. Ware later took him to a beach, where

Maclean attempted to run. He fell on his first two attempts, but on the third he stayed upright.

“Early on, I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to walk with my wife on the beach?’ ” Maclean says. “Ken said, ‘Here’s your wife, here’s the beach, off you go.’ Tears ran down both our faces.”
The athlete still uses the wheelchair as his primary mode of transportation, but is able to walk with the help of crutches and braces. He can now walk through the door and pick up his son at day care.

Says Maclean, “That’s my gold moment right there.”