This Inspirational 17-Year-Old is On a Roll

Special Contribution to Milesplitmass by:

By Barbara Huebner

In February of 2011, Katrina Gerhard was practicing with her sword-dance team when she fell on a backflip, hitting her neck on the floor. At first her injuries appeared to be relatively minor, but as the months passed the nerve pain increased until she could barely lift her feet, and things got worse from there.

Dark days? Probably a few, but good luck getting Gerhard, now 17, to talk about them. She will, however, tell you how great it feels to be named a captain of next year’s Acton-Boxborough (MA) High School track team, and how cool it was last month to race against 11-time Paralympic medalist and two-time Boston Marathon wheelchair winner Tatyana McFadden, and how much she’s looking forward to competing in the wheelchair division of the New Balance Falmouth Road Race.

“It’s kind of fun to see how far I’ve come,” she said in a recent telephone interview from Ames, IA, where she was competing in the National Junior Disability Championships. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this fit, even when I was dancing.”

In her sophomore year, Gerhard asked if she could join the school’s track team, and at first just worked out with them, still in her regular 45-pound wheelchair. But her coach, Ken Feit, and teammates urged her to compete; soon, teammate Kavya Katugam was organizing a fund-raiser to buy Gerhard a racing chair. Before long she was lining up against able-bodied athletes in high school meets.

Because of the relative disadvantage of the wheelchair in the sprints and relative advantage in the distance races, Gerhard’s results in high school meets don’t count for points. But they do count in other ways: For one thing, wheelchair events at 100 meters and in the shot put were added this spring to the state meet of the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA). Gerhard was the only competitor, but she called it an important step.

“The fact that they have it will, I think, encourage a lot of other disabled athletes [to compete] rather than hang around on the sidelines like I thought I would be doing,” she said.

Last winter, Gerhard met Coach Jim Cuevas at a wheelchair-racing clinic in Boston and joined his North Jersey Navigators racing team. Since then, she has learned proper technique (“I was pushing totally wrong before!”) and received the opportunity to travel for competitions, including the Fast Cow Invitational in Indianapolis earlier this summer where she was just hoping to see idols such as McFadden from afar but ended up racing alongside them in the same classification (T54).

“It was the coolest thing ever,” she said. “I lost every single race but PR’d by huge amounts. I loved having that pack of Illinois girls ahead of me so I could just keep pushing up to them.”

As Gerhard begins to look at colleges, she said, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—the mecca of high-caliber wheelchair racing in the United States—is high on her list. Regardless of where she ends up, she plans to pursue wheelchair racing at a high level, training for longer distances such as Falmouth and eventually for marathons. But she hasn’t given up entirely on dancing, either: this year she coached her former team, the Pocket Flyers out of Great Meadows Morris and Sword in Sudbury, to a national championship in performing traditional English sword-dancing routines.

At the National Junior Disability Championships, Gerhard won every individual event in which she was entered: 100, 200, 400, 800, 1500 and 5000 meters plus the shot put, discus and javelin. In all three field events, she broke national records for her Under-20 age group despite being its youngest competitor.

The New Balance Falmouth Road Race will be Gerhard’s longest race so far.

“I think it will be fun, especially if I can see the ocean,” she said. “I heard there’s quite a hill at the end. I’m up for the challenge.”

Of that, there is no doubt. As a former Acton-Boxborough teammate told the student newspaper: “She tackles the hardest races with a courage that no one else can give. She inspires me to try the impossible.”