Paratriathlete Melissa Stockwell looks toward gold after COVID adjustments
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - We all know the challenges many people have faced while working from home during the pandemic. Balancing parenting and work at the same time isn't easy, but imagine also training for the summer Paralympics on top of those obstacles.
Melissa Stockwell does it all. She's a veteran with a Purple Heart who lives and trains in Colorado Springs. She's also a wife and mother who already won a medal in Rio. She says blending motherhood and sport has been a rewarding but challenging shift.
"For a lot of months, this is where you could find me and it was trying to find that inner motivation," says Stockwell. "I didn't have my teammates around me, didn't have the smell and the sounds and the lights of the Olympic Training Center."
Since March of last year, Stockwell has been training in her basement and outside after the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center shut down due to COVID-19. The training facility opened briefly in the fall but then was shut down again due to a spike in cases. Just a few weeks ago, it opened yet again, but Stockwell is now pretty set at home, getting in a workout when she can.
"The balance of elite-level athletics and with being a wife and being a mom it's always a true juggle," says Stockwell.
But Stockwell is good at making adjustments and pedaling forward no matter how hard things might get. Especially after an accident 17 years ago that changed her life forever when she was serving overseas.
"I was just on a routine convoy through central Bagdad and the Humvee I was in was struck by a roadside bomb, which to make a long story short ultimately resulted in the loss of my left leg above the knee," says Stockwell.
While recovering from her leg amputation, she quickly formed a new dream, qualifying for the Paralympic Games.
"I could wear a uniform that had USA on it, represent the country I defended over in Iraq and I wanted to see what I could do with my life and how far I could go," says Stockwell.
Now 41-years-old, Stockwell trains in unusual places as she gears up for the next Paralympic Games, believing that good things come in threes, like in 2008, when she was given the great honor of carrying the American flag at the Beijing closing ceremonies. She then welcomed her first baby, Dallas, and then swam, biked, and ran her way onto the podium in Rio.
"Coming across the finish line, bronze medal, felt like a personal gold," says Stockwell. "My teammates got gold and silver, it was a USA sweep on September 11th. Standing on the podium, seeing three American flags go up, hearing our National Anthem is something that will go down as one of the greatest moments of my life."
With less than six months to go, Stockwell hopes to re-create that moment in Tokyo this summer at her third Paralympics. Now a mom of two, she never thought training for the Paralympics would involve reps just seconds between helping her kids and dodging puppies. But says she wouldn't have it any other way.
"I think a busy life is a good life," says Stockwell. "Being a mom is my favorite and it is the best job in the whole world and I would never want to change that and I think it actually in some ways maybe it's helped me because if I have a bad workout I don't come home and brood about it, there is so much else to do."
Stockwell and her husband recently opened a prosthetics company in Colorado Springs to help the community with custom orthotics, braces and prosthetics. She also just published her first memoir.
