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It was when his eyesight started to go on him, and he was depressed about not being able to play basketball with his friends, that the then-12-year-old Erik Weihenmayer was introduced to Terry Fox. He was watching, just a couple inches from the screen, the TV show That’s Incredible, which, as its title implies, featured people with exceptional stories. “Terry Fox was a Canadian who had lost his leg to cancer, and he decided that he was going to run across Canada”—to raise money for cancer research, says Erik, now 43. “A couple things struck me about that. One was that this seemed like the opposite of the natural decision a person in his situation was supposed to make. I didn’t know how to phrase it at the time, but instead of retreating, he attacked.”
 And, Erik adds, “I never forgot that image of him running. He was an above-the-knee amputee, so he had this old clunky artificial knee joint that would collapse under him. It looked like the most awkward, painful, inefficient gait you could imagine. That made me think, ‘These things aren’t easy; everything’s a struggle.’ Definitely for him, it was a struggle, every step he ran.”
But the seed had been planted in Erik, who was born legally blind and was losing what remained of his sight to retinoschisis, a juvenile degenerative disease that affects both peripheral and central vision. Impressed by Terry’s resolve, Erik no longer focused on what he couldn’t do, but on what he might be able to do.
It worked. Erik, who lives in Golden, Colorado, is now best-known as the first and only blind person to climb to the top of Mount Everest, a feat that landed him on the cover of TIME in 2001. But, to name just a few of his other accomplishments, he’s also scaled the rest of the Seven Summits (the highest peaks of the seven continents), skydived, skied, paraglided, authored two books and appeared, recently, on Expedition Impossible, a prime-time adventure show set in Morocco, where his team, No Limits, finished second out of 13.
A spokesperson for the Foundation Fighting Blindness, Erik will also appear at VISIONS 2012, FFB’s national conference, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in late June. A renowned international speaker, he’ll share with his audience the many ways in which he’s been able, as his book The Adversity Advantage posits, to capitalize on seemingly insurmountable challenges.
Erik’s co-author, Paul Stoltz, the author of previous books on adversity, puts people into three categories: quitters, campers and climbers. “Quitters are self-explanatory,” Erik explains, “but campers reach a certain degree of success and say, ‘Enough of that.’ Ultimately, it leads to stagnation. Climbers try to challenge themselves till the day they die, because as your body and brain evolve, you’re not interested in the exact same challenges. You move on to new things, and your life takes you to new places. And I’d like to do that as long as I can.”
As much as Erik has been able to achieve as a blind person, he is 100 percent behind the Foundation’s mission of eradicating blindness by finding treatments and cures. And as the father of two children—one natural, the other adopted from Nepal—he wouldn’t want them to face the adversity of losing one’s sight. “But while some of us go through life as blind people,” he says, “we can live with what I call a ‘no barriers’ mindset. You can figure out how to innovate and persevere your way through barriers, and to develop those tools that will enable you to do that.”
Erik’s barriers, over the years, have been many. After seeing Terry Fox – who ran 143 straight days for more than 3300 miles – Erik dove headlong into wrestling and rock-climbing. The former he considered the perfect combination of team and individual sport. “I think it’s crucial that every blind person get out there and join a team, and not just a team of blind people, but a team of sighted people.” The idea, he says, is to be an integral part of the whole, with each member’s specific skills contributing to something “bigger than you.”
 Rock-climbing Erik came across by accident, while taking a recreation course at a center for the blind. “Even though I couldn’t see [what was in front of me], I could use my hands and my feet as my eyes and sort of problem-solve my way up the rock face,” he recalls. “I thought that was the ultimate adventure.”
Just as he got started, however, Erik’s mother was killed in a car accident. To keep the family close, his father, Ed, an adventurous spirit who’d flown attack jets in Vietnam, took Erik and his two older brothers on annual treks abroad – exotic places like Peru, New Guinea and Tajikistan. It was hard, at first, because Erik used only a white cane and his father’s guiding hand on his shoulder, not the tools needed for such rough terrain. “But, over time, I sort of painfully learned how to navigate in the wilderness,” he recalls.
That knowledge came in handy. In his mid-twenties, Erik embarked on a 13-year odyssey of scaling the Seven Summits, each time with a team of trusted, extremely skilled friends. He has since competed in grueling team competitions, including Expedition Impossible, which, he says, “sounded like a cool challenge”—mostly because the participants didn’t know ahead of time what the activities would be. Though he had no interest in becoming a reality-TV star, he was surprised by the “thousands of emails and Facebook messages from families saying, ‘Hey, my kids watched you guys, and they were cheering when you squeaked through and crying when they thought you might be eliminated.’”
In the climbing and adventure-seeking world, Erik actually is a star. The first of his two books, Touch the Top of the World, is a best-selling memoir that was made into a TV movie in 2006. And he’s appeared in several documentary films, including Blindsight, the story of how he helped a group of blind Tibetan teenagers climb to 21,500 feet on the north side of Everest. He’s also the co-founder of No Barriers, a nonprofit promoting technologies and techniques that help disabled people live active lives.
The no-barriers mindset is something Erik recognizes in the Foundation, with which he became involved after meeting Gordon Gund, a fellow ski enthusiast, through an acquaintance. “To figure out the cures and even ways of stopping the progression of these diseases – it’s the hardest adversity that you could embrace as a human being,” Erik says. “You have to surround yourself not only with the smartest people and those with the most talent, but people who believe. And so much of finding a cure and doing great things is your belief system. You see it being possible in the future.”
 With that in mind, Erik says he “couldn’t say no” to presenting at VISIONS, where he’ll also address a youth session, attended by kids roughly the same age he was when he first saw Terry Fox on TV. Although Terry died of cancer before he could finish his run across Canada, he inspired a national movement which, today, lives on in the Terry Fox Foundation, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for research and, among other events, hosts a Terry Fox Run annually. “For somebody who only lived till 22 years old,” Erik says, “I would say that’s a pretty impactful life.” |
