wonderful to have you here today who are approaching the thirty sixth year of the founding of achilles can you please tell me about what that was like going back thirty six years ago i had been running as an air p t and i've been running marathons and i thought it was a great great saying and i thought i would be nice to introduce other people to it so we started by having a eight week running program for people with disabilities at the end of the program the issue is what do we do now that we have another eight week program that we just stop and the idea was let's move it from a course to a club and we call that achilles recall that he killed his truck than other clubs we are international all over the world were throughout the united states and we have a few things in our mission which are different from other groups so the first thing that is very very different is we believe in mainstreaming and that's the idea of people with disabilities not necessarily working out only with people with disabilities but working out with everybody else and what this does is it increases the comfort level of people with disabilities but it also increases the comfort level of people who are not this able competing with the disabled and of course our biggest and most visible events are the marathon so we recently had well over two hundred people running in the new york city marathon and there is a process where these folks pass able bodied rudderless in the past by able the concept of achievement ok and what we do is we encourage people very very few of any of which ever thought of doing math science to come out to become involved with our sport which is running and eventually to complete a marathon and what we're doing is we're in fact giving people opportunity to do what most people would think would have been impossible you know think of a person with no legs double amputee running twenty six miles an hour official records absolutely impossible it's incredible it makes me think of walter reed and the start of the freedom team and the amazing stories that that you tell how did that begin what will integration into two thousand and four there were a lot of articles being written about people coming back from afghanistan and iraq and hav ok and i had the great outer of going into the hospital meeting people who are maybe six or eight weeks out of afghanistan and introducing myself and i have skiing and happy t are you going to do the new york city marathon we ha and they look at me as if i was nuts that they would look at me like well maybe i was in the wrong room and what i was really doing is i was planting a seed of achievement and then we would have workouts and they'd come out and start to walk they would start to use crutches and we started to focus on their using hand cycles and all of a sudden here is a happy t and he or she gets into a hand cycle it's like a bike except you use your arms rather than your legs yeah and you're out there and you're moving and it's holy smokes i have a sport and more  important and that was not only did they have a sport but they had other amputees to compete with so that they had a sport but they also had a group and it was fun one of my favorite stories talking what to read was a situation where one of our athletes is about to have maybe his fiftieth or twenty of surgery goes over to his medical doctor and says sir is it ok postpone my surgery for a week so i can do the boston marathon this is just a very incredible and special and unique element of achilles is the group and what people get out of that group not only the athletes but the gu the most important motivational factor and what we do is the bonding ok of people if you watch the math or you'll see people out there who are doing something that's absolutely impossible and  out and working out or could be a larger group like the folks that are doing the new york city marathon and we're playing with that who are saying what how how could you do this and we're talking about we're talking about it and  the group or the micro community and recently i wrote a book with david core danny david is the president and c e o of cigna and the book addressed this issue and the group motivating factor that made all of these people into success stories is the picture is a copy of the book the name is the courage to go forward and if you're interested in reading about it you can go to amazon you can go to his international you can go to barnes and noble and just order it you know we recently had the new york city marathon and to my delight we had thirty five people coming from new zealand which is a bit away and they were coming to celebrate the twenty fifth anniversary of the founding of the chapter in new zealand and we have nine cities involve s with different chapters they knew it was a second group and this group was from tokyo and believe it or not we have four hundred visually impaired runners in our tokyo chapter and we but imagine a person losing a leg in mongolia and being you know treated somewhat differently than they might be treated here in the sense of oh you only have one leg you can't go back to school or you you need you if you get out there in society people will tease you or will ignore you and come in from there to running a marathon and people cheering the whole way jury in the hallway but what's also important is when a person from mongolia thinking really of our president her name is sarah young lady lost her leg she was w horse jumped up koester she fell down broke a leg it became infected she lost a leg and she stayed for two years in her home and the family was embarrassed for her to be see outside eventually she did get over that she joined the kill is she's run the marathon with us and she's our star before the chapter and she's out there running the marathon what happens now is that people see her differently they see her as having a halo or you can see my halo over here last but she has a halo so when people see sarah they don't see her some young lady with one leg but they see her as a hero someone who has overcome her disability is invigorated her to do more and what's interesting is she's currently finish your ph d in italy wow and such a great example also for other people alan go you know we have a race in mongolia where we have a race in a many countries in particularly new york city it's called the hope and possibility here and in mongolia we has thirty three hundred people in tahrir participate in this race approximately one hundred of whom have disabilities in the concept of the race is the mainstreaming in other words what's happening is people with disabilities  running in a road race in a marathon along with people who are not the same boat so you have that but what's very very important is the race is being put on by a group of disabled athletes so it's not necessarily the nice great friendly non disabled can really help in the disabled but it's the disabled people inviting the community to participate with them and that changes and this is before your time but back in one thousand nine hundred ninety she was running in central park and she was accosted raped left for dead and she became known as the central park jogger and founding board chair and then she wrote a book and the book was called i am the central park jogger the story of hope and possibility so when her book was coming out we began our race and we thought that help the book it would be nice to name the race after her book and beat came the hope and possibility race that we have it each year in central park the last couple of years we sold out and seventy five hundred  people have several hundred people with disabilities as well as several thousand people who are not disabled yes yeah and what we do is we provide extra prizes in different categories for people with disabilities  of just having the prizes for people male female and different age groups we have prizes for amputees we have prizes for people using push room wheelchair or you know hand cycles we have prizes for people who are visually impaired yes it's amazing and you see at the start the sea of hands cycles the sea of it achilles kids also kill these kids is another program that we have it's actually our largest program people wise we have right now in the united states twelve thousand children with disabilities we're in twenty one states in new york we have one hundred forty five schools we do it with the adaptive physical education department so kids in their schools run laps or whatever and they track their mileage and their goal is to run over the period of the school year total of twenty six point two miles which is a marathon they  but also there are lots of prizes along the way but the nice thing that we're doing is we're providing these kids with the goal we're providing these kids with the opportunity to achieve and they also have this joy of bonding in that they're faster than people who are slower the people they have something to talk about and they have a game that's fantastic and it inspires them throughout their life not only physically and emotionally and socially mentally but also educationally wouldn't you say the effect of this is incredible yes well we recently did a study we took ninety four kids to we found that if you are on the autism spectrum and you run you'll improve physically which is a no brainer which you also improve cognitively and socially and of the different groups of people with disability children i think the kids on the spectrum get the most out of it because what happens is that they are not different physically from the kids who are not on the spectrum but when they're in shape they are faster so they'll be running in races and they will realize that they're pretty good athletes and this in many many cases is the one thing that they can do better than their able bodied pyrrus and they feel very very good about the whole not a part of it is if you're on the autism spectrum you know sit here be still stand there and almost certainly get out they could run they can use their body and they love it and it's one of my favorite programs i'm curious to say to see what what you think about where the future lies well what we've done which we have five major programs so we have the hope and possibility race we have the killer's kids we have the  chapters we're doing research we have another one that's called the freedom team and freedom team is a group was really many groups but it's a group of soldiers with disabilities and they do a series of marathons because the marathon tour you know how the united states is what i'm interested in doing now is increasing the number of chapters that we have interested in extending the research so we did this wonderful study with autism i'm interested in doing another study the effects of running on people were tragic brain injuries we have some very very good a forty international chapters we have presidents we wanted to people in different countries in about seventy countries are like us to build the number of chapters and to expand what we have yes touch more lives and bring the spirit of achievement and the spirit of the group of the chillies yes even further was the world so i'm curious how did you get started t goes back many many years ago i was running a business and i used to speak at the american medical merican management association and one of our leaders in his late thirty's had a heart attack and the other one of the directors sore me i was overweight i limped know when you had an artificial leg and he suggested that i would be a great candidate for a heart attack why not join a y m c a and i went ahead and i i did is i learned how to like if you had if you had broken leg and you were trying to cross the street how do you how do you get across if you have a hop and skip and i tried doing had over a period and i have what's called a type a personality so the question was if you could do a mile could you do two miles and which i did and then eventually as we talked about in the book  i joined a group and we had friends we had competition we had goals and i went from doing two miles to a five mile race to half marathon in the marathon so i got involved in the sport  city marathon continue the run and i kept coming in dead last so the issue was you know why not find other people out there to run and i would keep coming in  run on myself by myself and we started coaching other people and we found people who were obviously faster than i was and this created a wonderful joy that i was  how do you as a person with disability give other people opportunity to do something that is virtually impossible yes and making it possible for them right yes and doing it together and sharing  that joy and that in cheeseman i mean you see so many athletes coming to work at achilles brooklyn they bring their medals athlete then guide sharing their medals with the new york city marathon having so we had a celebration and it's a spirit is is is so amazing one of our athletes passed away recently and at his funeral he asked to have his new york city marathon medal put neck and that's how much it meant to him you know the kids will run twenty six miles and they will receive a medal which they will put around their neck and they may work for weeks on end of the school because they are marathoners they know they have done serving and they're very very proud of this who heard about it yes it's incredible yeah it's the spirit of achilles and i think from starting like you did with the eight week program and so small with you and just a group of others and to see it it speaks volumes that that spirit of the group and that spirit of of empowering others and inspiring them for achievement to spread all over the world we have fun yeah you know i think of of spirit as a sixth sense helping what we're doing is we're we're giving people this great grand thing that i call spirit you know it's the kind of thing you're out there you run marathons you're running the marathon you finish my how twenty six you going out for the last quarter mile people are hoarding and there's no feeling that's better than that and i call that spirit in what we're doing is we're giving people an opportunity to enjoy to to  spirit the sixth sense yeah yeah it's so true and they keep coming back and keep going and you see how it affects the rest of their lives there's an athlete in particular i'm thinking of that took about twenty minutes to walk to the prospect park for the workout and now she can make it in time for the circle circle up and say our names and some share something special and now she's applying for jobs and she's going back to work  she suffered from a stroke but it's she discovered achilles and now walking and working out and really seeking a lot of wonderful really rehabilitation and doing jitter first race hope and possibility really interesting for me is someone goes out and they do a first race or perhaps they do a marathon has a cross the finish line first thing in their head is what is my next goal what is the next thing that i can see that might be getting married which does happen you know it might be getting a job or it might be going back to school or picking up an additional degree but what we have done is we have instilled the spirit of achievement  that's a wonderful wonderful thing to to provide others with yeah i commend you for the work you do and the spirit that you yourself because i really believe that it came from you love for sport love for movement but also really the joy of achieving and spreading that to others who were very lucky when we started achilles if you had asked what is your main what you know where you're going with this the goal was to have a track club you know like the central park track love the prospect park track club you know just a group of people who would go out there would work out once or twice a week and do some races and that was the total vision and of course it went beyond that and went far beyond that and it is continuing to grow we are the we try we were actually the first people we did the first study on running and traumatic brain injuries it was sort of a correlational study where it was nice but it really was a great so i'm looking to do something in terms of getting people you know with track brain injuries testing retest and prove this very important thing but there are other areas that are still undiscovered for example one of the things that's happening is that if you have a stroke new you go out there and you sometimes during her walk and as you expand expand your walking you get better but there's very little that's being done with the arm  we've discovered that if you have a stroke and you start using a hand cycle where you go like this here you have one on this pretty good you have another arm that's not so good and sometimes it needs to be tied onto the cycle and what you're doing is you are expanding the range of motion and you're increasing the range of motion in the profound matter now we've also found that this issue works for people who are diagnosed as quadriplegic so a quadriplegic if i have this kind of a range of motion you know in many cases and the quadriplegic coming out and using that has a cycle over a period quadriplegics folk wads and then they you know they are technically quadriplegic but they can do so many things in terms of their range of motion that no one would ever call them quadriplegic in additional issue equally important concerns the concept of happiness with life or where satisfaction and if you come out and you participate with the killis and you run and you have the group when you you have these micro communities we talk about a you would become a happier person so we're taught now typically with the freedom to him the issue of how do you use writing to address depression you know ok this has been done in other ways running in general has been shown to improve or are in of the fight depression as well as any medication yeah now if you talk about people with disabilities i believe the same thing will happen but again i think it it's very important to study it yeah so one of the things i'm interested in terms of were we going in the future is to do some research and just sort of prove some of the things that we talk about yeah as a researchers frame porton also for for funding there is money for research ye yes correct the other thing i'm very proud of is when we started to kill us if you had a disability like i did you weren't embarrassed about it necessarily but you didn't brag about it you didn't we know bring it was invisible and today people are very proud like one of our athletes your name is terry duckworth and she is a senator from chicago and she lost her legs in a helicopter crash she joined achilles she's done a number of marathons with us but when she was elected to congresswoman before she became a senator there was a picture of her the new york times and there she was with other freshman females congressman and she was wearing a short skirt and it was very very obvious that she had to artificial legs so rather than trying to hide the disability she was out there being very proud of it and  this is a i think a very very important and something it's really advanced over the last several years yeah and being proud and being a role model in central park for example