Limitless

The Power of Hope and Resilience to Overcome Circumstance

Mallory Weggemann, Tiffany Yecke Brooks

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781400223473
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialwissenschaftliche Biographien

An inspiring true story of an athlete overcoming obstacles and unimaginable setbacks with resilience, faith, and the power of refusing to accept limits.

Meet Mallory Weggemann: a Paralympic gold-medalist, world champion swimmer, ESPY winner, and NBC Sports commentator whose extraordinary story will give you the encouragement you need to rise up to meet any challenge you face in life.

On January 21, 2008, a routine medical procedure left Mallory paralyzed from her waist down. Less than two years later, Mallory had broken eight world records, and by the 2012 Paralympic Games, she held fifteen world records and thirty-four American records. Two years after that, a devastating fall severely damaged her left arm. But despite all of the hardships that Mallory faced, she was sure about one thing: she refused to give up.

After two reconstructive surgeries and extended rehab, she won two gold medals and a silver medal at the 2019 World Para Swimming Championships. And even better, she found confidence, independence, and persevering love. She even walked down the aisle on her wedding day against all odds.

Mallory's extraordinary resilience and uncompromising commitment to excellence are rooted in her resolve, her faith, and her sheer grit. In Limitless, Mallory shares the lessons she learned by pushing past every obstacle and expectation that stood in her way, teaching you how to: 

• Redefine your limits
• Remember that healing is not chronological
• Be willing to fail
• Lean on your community
• Embrace your comeback
• Write your own ending

 

Mallory's story reminds us that we can handle whatever challenges, labels, or difficulties we face in life, and we can do it on our own terms. Because when we refuse to accept every boundary that hems us in—physical, emotional, or societal—we become limitless.

ONE

YOU CAN CHANGE THE WORLD . . . BUT YOU CAN’T DO IT ALONE

“You see this, girls?” Dad asked his three young daughters as he gestured out his window toward the sweeping stretch of wheat that extended to the horizon in every direction.

We saw it, and we knew what was coming. “This is the breadbasket of America,” Christin, Jessica, and I chanted along with him, cracking up. Whether we were in the prairies of North Dakota or making our way through the southern parts of Canada, wherever Dad saw vast fields, he made the same comment, for three weeks straight—every summer. We were a sight. Our family of five loaded up in the Suburban with two car-top carriers as we made our way west from our home in Minnesota. Dad was wearing his canvas bucket hat that made its appearance each summer for our family road trips; Mom was sitting in the front seat with the map sprawled out on the dashboard, shaking her head. Each year the trip varied a little, but it always brought us to the Canadian Rockies—one of our favorite places in the world.

As children of the nineties, my older sisters and I didn’t have technology to keep ourselves occupied, just one another and whatever game we could make up in the moment. The script was the same every year: Jessica and I sat in the middle; our biggest decision was whose legs took the inside and whose took the outside as we sprawled across the middle seat playing Barbies and making up our own secret language. Christin, the oldest, always had the back seat all to herself. She is seven years older than I am, and Jessica splits us in the middle; therefore, in Christin’s eyes, she had already paid her big-sister dues and got the luxury of a whole row for herself and Nancy Drew.

Those trips defined my childhood in a lot of ways. My dad wanted nothing more than to share his love for the outdoors with us girls, and my mom wanted to carry on one of her favorite traditions of family road trips, so they spent all year anticipating and planning for our summer camping adventures. My mom is the queen of preparation, so she would spend weeks making packing lists, planning activities for the car to keep us occupied, double-checking that she packed our tapes (remember when that was how we played music?) and the ultra-high-tech converter for playing CDs through the tape deck, triple-checking our first aid kit, and, of course, packing the trusty green bin that housed all our snacks for the days on the road.

All these years later, I have come to realize the important lessons my parents instilled in us amid the jokes and family bonding as we navigated west each summer. Since we camped the entire way, we weren’t bound by the tyranny of hotel reservations; instead, when we came to significant junctions or forks in the road, my parents would turn to us and ask, “Girls, which way: left or right?” We decided together, as a family, which path we wanted to take. At the time, it just seemed like part of the adventure, but now I can see it was actually a valuable lesson in adaptability. From the second row of the family Suburban, I learned that life isn’t always about following a predetermined path, but making choices in the moment and rolling with whatever comes when the course changes.

When we were children, my sisters and I moved as a unit—whether we were running around gathering sticks at our campsite to build a fire or make a fort for the slugs (Jessica’s favorite), I looked up to the two of them and, in true little sister fashion, wanted to do whatever they were doing. I wanted to be exactly like my big sisters, so I carefully copied everything they did—and not just on our road trips. Christin began swimming in middle school, and soon after Jessica did too. At first, I was just known as “Little-Little Weggie” around the pool deck, toting around my bag of coloring books and sprawling out in front of the window looking over the pool deck. But it didn’t take long before I decided to follow in my sisters’ footsteps, which meant more practices and races for my parents. Still, they never missed a meet and were always the loudest in the stands. The swimming community became our second family, and I felt every bit at home in the pool as I did in my own house. Being a swimmer was part of my core identity, and my sisters’ too. Our parents embraced it, as they did everything we pursued, wholeheartedly.

Despite our busy schedules of swim practices, piano lessons, schoolwork, and church youth group, every evening our family would sit down at the kitchen table together and have dinner. It didn’t matter if we had to eat late because Mom was working a twelve-hour shift at the hospital where she was a nurse, or if we had to eat early to accommodate our extracurriculars, we always sat down and talked about our day as we shared a meal. My family is big on rituals and traditions, and dinner was no exception. Every month as Mom wrote out the family calendar, she rotated through each person’s initials so that all three of us got our own special days where we sat in the designated “special spot” and got to select the evening prayer. When I was preparing for my first communion and learning the Lord’s Prayer, I took my special days as an opportunity to practice and stumbled through until I got it perfect. Dinner probably got cold some nights as my family waited until I was satisfied with how the prayer came out, but in true Mallory fashion, I was determined not only to get it right but to do it by myself.

From the time I first learned to talk, my favorite phrase was “I do it.” I had two doting parents and two older sisters always ready to step in and help, so my independent streak bristled at the constant babying. At two, I refused assistance on everything from getting dressed to building block towers to fearlessly leaping off the side of the pool into the water. By the time I started kindergarten, “I do it” had become a family joke; it was my unofficial motto for life.

My family’s rituals were a comfort to me and to my sisters, because we could count on them even if everything else went haywire. Like my mother’s motto “good overcomes,” my father had a saying he repeated to us every night as he and Mom tucked us in: “You are the best, you can make a difference, and you can change the world.”

As a child, I never fully understood the weight those words carried; I just accepted them as true. Each night when my parents tucked me into bed, I was reminded that I wasn’t just loved, but appreciated and supported—lessons that proved vital as I grew older.

While my early childhood was filled with memories of cruising through the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, my later adolescence was shaped by something far less blissful.

In middle school, I was less consumed with popularity contests and gossip, and more occupied by an awareness that my strong, smart, and beautiful oldest sister, Christin, was struggling through an eating disorder. It took her years of residential treatment, hard work, and perseverance, but by the time Christin was in her early twenties and I was in high school, it seemed she had started to turn a corner. And then the bottom dropped out of our lives.

Throughout the fall of 2005, while Jessica was away at college and I was coming into my own as an upperclassman, Christin was hospitalized due to major complications following a surgery. Despite all her progress, she had recently been diagnosed with an underlying stomach condition: gastroparesis—one of those big medical words that really just means your stomach isn’t digesting food properly. She needed a feeding tube to help her stomach work, but the surgery took a sudden and drastic turn for the worse.

“Mallory Weggemann—are you still in here?” called one of my high school guidance counselors as she stuck her head into the locker room. It was just before noon on Halloween of my junior year of high school; I had just finished gym class and was changing to go to lunch. My heart sank. I knew immediately from her voice that something was wrong with Christin, and I walked out of the locker room to see my father in the hall, in tears.

The twenty-minute drive to the hospital felt like an eternity. Neither of us were able to speak. Finally, just before we stepped onto the elevator at the hospital, he turned to me and took a deep breath. “I want to prepare you for what you’re about to see,” he said quietly. “Christin is in the ICU, and she is hooked up to a bunch of different machines and monitors. Mal.” Dad’s voice caught as he tried to speak the next words gently, “She’s fighting for her life.”

As we walked into the room, the terror in my father’s eyes suddenly made sense. There was my oldest sister, lying motionless on the bed, with her feeble heartbeat on the monitor. Mom was holding Christin’s hand and crying. Jessica joined us a few minutes later, having left her college campus as soon as she got word, and our pastor arrived soon afterward. Together we stood around Christin’s bed as our pastor led us in the Lord’s Prayer while the nurses prepared to wheel her out for another surgery. Suddenly, faintly, Christin’s voice joined in: “Give us this day . . .” My heart filled with hope; maybe, just maybe, that was her way of saying she was still there and still fighting. I thought back to those nights at the dinner table when Christin chimed in to help me as I struggled to remember the words to the prayer we were reciting together now, and I smiled. She didn’t open her eyes or say anything else besides the whisper of the prayer, but that moment gave us all something to hold on to as we watched her roll down the hallway to the operating room.

It wasn’t the same as a fork in the road in southern Canada, but at that moment, when we all felt the weight of unimaginable loss looming over us, we made a choice as a family to embrace each moment as we fought together to help Christin find her way back to herself again. She survived surgery that day, though many difficult years and several more brushes with death marked her recovery. It felt so unfair, watching her battle with courage and strength through her eating disorder, only to be met with profound health complications due to a completely unrelated condition. I watched as my brilliant sister struggled to regain her memory; I prayed for my “Sistin” (as I called her when I was young) to remember who I was. My heart ached as I watched her fight to learn how to talk again, build the strength to walk on her own, and piece her life together—but she did pull through and emerged healthy, whole, and unbelievably strong on the other side.

My family’s faith in one another never wavered, and neither did my father’s words to us each night: “You are the best, you can make a difference, and you can change the world.” He wanted his girls to believe those words deep in their souls, so he never stopped reminding us of those truths, even if his voice shook a little as he said it. Seeing both the strength and the vulnerability of my parents through the ups and downs of Christin’s battle comforted me because I knew I would never be alone, no matter what happened in my own life.

There isn’t really such a thing as going back to “normal” after trauma, because somewhere along the way your perception of normal changes based on your experiences. This was certainly the case for my family. By my senior year of high school, while Christin was still battling to restore her health, I came down with a severe case of mono that never fully resolved; eventually, I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, followed by a case of shingles. These health struggles were incredibly frustrating, but not as devastating as they might have been had I not already witnessed Christin’s courageous battle. My senior year was hardly the experience I’d always hoped for. While I had the honor of serving as one of the captains for our high school swim team, my deteriorating health (not to mention the emotional stress of my personal life) took its toll on my body. Still, there was something comforting about the water—a place where I found solace and that welcomed me as I navigated through the unbearable realities our family was facing. The water was my escape, somewhere I simply put my head down and focused on the black line that trailed the pool floor below me. It was a space where I could just be without worrying about everything and everyone else around me. Little did I know then how instrumental the love I built with swimming would become in my future.

I think that’s one of the biggest lessons I learned as a teen: we will all face circumstances that aren’t ideal, when we are dealt a hand that is more than what we feel we signed up for. But we always have a choice: Do we focus on the pain, or do we choose to see the love that surrounds us? We can decide not just how we move forward, but the way we perceive the world. We can choose to see heartbreak, loss, and hopelessness, or we can choose to see the beauty and believe that we are the best, we can make a difference, and we can change the world.

Despite my dreams of going to college out of state, I put my plans on hold and enrolled at a local community college to take my general education credits. I could transfer later, I reasoned. I relied on the emotional support of my parents as I began a series of epidural injections to help treat the horrific nerve pain I experienced. While my shingles rash resolved, my nerves reacted as if they were still infected, causing a condition called postherpetic neuralgia, which resulted in searing pain. I was prescribed a series of three treatments spaced out over six months, with the last one scheduled for Martin Luther King Jr. Day—January 21, 2008. The first two went as expected, and I was up and about the following day, feeling like my old self again. So I had no reason to think that the final injection would be any different.

It was a gray, cloudy, Minnesota winter day as my dad drove me to the clinic for my last treatment. Usually my mom went with me, but she was on the schedule that day as a pediatric nurse, so Dad had the honors. As we walked into the clinic, I told him that Mom always came with me into the procedure room, since I’ve always been squeamish with needles. “I just want to squeeze your hand while they do the injection, okay?” I asked. He, of course, agreed.

A few minutes later the nurse called my name, and Dad and I both followed her back. We briefly talked through the procedure process as I got settled on the gurney, lying on my stomach with my dad standing at my head. As I waited for the injection to begin, I looked down at my dad’s feet and I heard the echoing of the doctor and nurse talking, but everything after that point remains a blur. Some moments are burned indelibly in my brain in the most painfully exquisite detail, and others escape me completely or only flash through my memory in brief waves, as if my brain wants to save me from trauma but my heart can’t let go.

The sterile smell of the room. The bright lights. The voices of the doctor and nurse. That jarring sound of my legs suddenly dropping lifelessly to the table and the jolt of pain. Then . . . nothing.

My heart began to race. Something was different—maybe not wrong, but definitely different. I looked to my dad as he held my hand reassuringly. Moments later, the staff wheeled my gurney into the recovery room, where I was supposed to sit and wait for the numbing medication to wear off. But as the hours ticked by and the feeling didn’t return to my legs, we realized that something wasn’t right.

“That’s perfectly normal,” the medical team assured us whenever we asked a question. “Just give it a few more hours.”

The afternoon wore on. Finally, my dad turned to me and said calmly, “Sweetie, I’ll be right back.” And he stepped out into the hallway.

“Annie,” I heard my dad say in hushed tones as he spoke with my mom over the phone. “Something isn’t right. I’m worried.”

My heart sank as I overheard him describing my symptoms. This couldn’t be happening. Not again. My family had far too many memories in the hospital over the past few years. Determined not to give in to my fears, I shook away the bad thoughts and smiled as Dad came back into the room. “It is just taking a little longer than normal, but it’s fine,” I told him, praying my words would prove to be true.

When 4:45 p.m. rolled around and my condition hadn’t changed, a representative from the clinic informed us their building was closing and I would need to be transferred to the hospital across the street for further observation. Dad had been calling Mom with periodic updates all afternoon, but with this piece of news, she knew in her gut that something serious had happened. “I’ll be right there,” she told him.

Moments later, the nurses came to transfer me, wheeling my bed through the tunnel under the street that connected the clinic and the hospital. When we reached my new room, I looked into the bright sterile li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Good Overcomes
• Chapter 1: You Can Change the World . . . But You Can’t Do It Alone
• Chapter 2: Face Your Fears
• Chapter 3: Move Forward
• Chapter 4: Limitless
• Chapter 5: Healing Is Not Chronological
• Chapter 6: Rise Above
• Chapter 7: Find Your Why
• Chapter 8: Redefine Your Limitations
• Chapter 9: Be Willing to Fail
• Chapter 10: Love Perseveres
• Chapter 11: Embrace Your Comeback
• Chapter 12: Write Your Own Ending
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author