Ride of her life

Standing patiently at the base of the stage, Jamie Whitmore waited for her cue. She turned, facing the audience, then slowly but confidently backed her way up a metal ramp along the left edge. Looping past the sign-language interpreter seated by a chest-high table, Whitmore grabbed a microphone, strode ahead and accepted applause.

Those few moments represented a snapshot of the life story she shared with the 100-plus people—36 of them young athletes with disabilities—who came to hear her speak at the El Rey Theater last Tuesday evening (June 19).

Patience. Perseverance. Adaptation. Appreciation. Those characteristics, and others, have defined the past decade for Whitmore, whose career as a professional triathlete got derailed by cancer but career as an athlete did not.

With a leg brace and special shoe, she’s able to compete in para-cycling—bicycle racing, sanctioned by the sport’s international federation, with modifications for riders’ physical limitations. She’s won four world championships since 2013 and two medals, gold and silver, in the 2016 Paralympic Games. She met President Barack Obama at the White House as well as marquee Olympians of Team USA. She also received an ESPY Award, in 2014, as Best Female Athlete with a Disability.

Those milestones followed a series of crossroads, of tough choices. Would she linger in bed, or would she push herself to walk? Would she find satisfaction in the trappings of home life, or push herself back into athletics’ elite?

At each juncture, Whitmore remembered a lesson her father imparted during her childhood: You can be what you want—attitude is everything.

“Even though cancer changed my path,” she said, “I was able to chase my dream.”

This message in particular moved Chuck Nadeau, president of Ability First Sports, which last week held its annual summer camp at Chico State. Ability First offers youth with disabilities—this year, from as far away as Arkansas—the chance to learn adaptive sports such as para-cycling from coaches who compete at world-class levels. Campers got to see Whitmore, 42, front and center at the El Rey before she coached them the next morning.

“It’s really great to get a speaker like Jamie to come in to talk about the adversity she faced, the challenges that were in front of her and what she was able to do to overcome those and continue pursuing on,” he told the CN&R afterward, as Whitmore signed autographs and posed for photos with her Paralympics medals.

“We have a couple of coaches who have been part of the Paralympics … I don’t think we’ve had a gold medalist Paralympic athlete come to our camp before. This is definitely a pretty big deal.”

Whitmore’s appearance at the El Rey (hosted by Chico firm Red Rock Financial) and the Ability First camp was not her first time here. A Sacramento-area native, she ran track and cross-country for Valley High and earned a scholarship to Cal State Northridge.

The triathlon piqued her interest, specifically XTERRA—a series comprising swimming, mountain biking and off-road trail running. First, in 2001, Whitmore earned her pro card in mountain biking. Over the next six years, she’d win more XTERRA races (37) than anyone else on the circuit, male or female, along with one world championship and six U.S. championships.

“I was living the dream,” she recalled. “I was super stoked.”

In 2007, at age 31, racing in Maui, everything changed.

At the start of the bike stage, her left leg cramped. She felt “worse and worse” with each successive mile, overcompensating with her right leg, and entered the final run “farther back than ever.” Both legs cramped, yet she willed her way to a third-place finish.

The pain in her left leg didn’t subside. Several months later, in January 2008, she couldn’t sleep. Whitmore tried taking a bike ride in February, but the pain was excruciating.

The cause remained a mystery until physicians at UC San Francisco found a tumor of a rare cancer wrapped around the sciatic nerve. Surgery took over nine hours and left her unable to fully move her foot.

Whitmore needed to relearn how to walk.

Doctors said her pro career was over, that she’d never run, that she’d never ride more than a stationary bike. The latter, she refused to accept—she was determined to return to mountain biking, maybe even ride in the Paralympics, which she knew about from XTERRA’s partnership with the Challenged Athletes Foundation.

Four days into radiation, Whitmore learned her cancer had returned. A grapefruit-size sarcoma had grown out of the sciatic and headed up her spine. She had a 12-hour surgery that July that cost her muscle tissue and led to a bout with sepsis, a sometimes fatal infection.

From 115 pounds, her 5-foot-5 frame thinned to 98 pounds.

She recovered her strength, recovered from the disease—she’s gone 10 years cancer-free. She got sick again, but this time found the cause to be positive: pregnancy. Her twin sons, Christian and Ryder, were born in January 2010; the family lives in Somerset, a small community near Placerville. Eventually, she got herself back on a mountain bike, back to running (aided by crutches) and swimming—back in an XTERRA triathlon.

These days—when not training, competing or spending time with the boys—Whitmore travels far and wide delivering motivational talks.

“Whoever will listen to my story, I’ll go share it,” she told the CN&R with a hearty chuckle. “I want to do it forever.”

What does she hope people take from her story?

“That you have the ability to do whatever you want,” Whitmore replied, “and you can never let someone else prevent you from [doing] that. The bigger you dream, people are going to go, ‘That’s crazy!’—but you have to believe in that dream. It might not look how everybody else does it, but you’ll do it, you’ll figure it out.”