Athlete Backs In At Boston Cerebral Palsy Victim Plans Backward Marathon

Jason Pisano’s grandmother gets a wistful look and lets out a slow laugh when she talks about the games they played when he was a little boy.

Despite having cerebral palsy that left him with limited use of his arms and unable to walk, Pisano learned to box. He’d have two red boxing gloves strapped to his feet and lie on a mat, ready for anyone from “Grama” to Sugar Ray Leonard.

“I’d put paint on my face and a mask and I’d come out fighting,” said Barbara Pisano, laughing. “Then I’d yell, ‘Ring the bell! Ring the bell!’ He’s killing me!”’

Her stories continue. How Pisano learned to bat with his knees, play street hockey and miniature golf in his wheelchair, and use his left foot - the stronger of the two - to draw, kick a football and even stuff the Thanksgiving turkey.

Now 23, Pisano uses the foot to type essays and tests as a sports journalism student at the University of Connecticut.

On April 17, he plans to use it for another task: to push himself - backward - over the 26.2 miles of the Boston Marathon.

“If you tell Jay he can’t do something, well, then he’s definitely going to do it,” said his mother, Michele Pisano of West Warwick, who raised her son after divorcing his father more than a decade ago.

She nodded her head in agreement as Pisano, word by garbled word, got out the sentences: “I use (as motivation) people who tell me I can’t. I feel relaxed when I can compete.”

Seated at the kitchen table of Barbara Pisano’s trailer home, he listened as his mother and grandmother answered questions about his life, laughing at stories of his escapades, which include going out to bars with friends and beeping his mother for a ride home.

Mother and grandmother have tried to make Pisano’s life as normal as possible and have encouraged his love of sports. But it’s not always easy.

“It’s a constant fight,” Michele Pisano said as she relayed the story of how Boston Marathon officials first said he could not race.

After some debate and a casual reference to Pisano’s “legal representatives,” race officials said he would not be removed from the course as long as no cars accompany him, as there were when he raced in Rhode Island’s Ocean State Marathon in October.

Still, Pisano and his family must make sacrifices to compete. Because Pisano has not met the qualifying time for Boston Marathon wheelchair competitors, he, his mother, grandmother and several friends plan to drive to the starting line in Hopkinton, Mass., at midnight Sunday and start the race by themselves.

“No one’s ever done the Boston Marathon backward, so what kind of time would he have to qualify for?” asked Michele Pisano, who said she nearly got into a fistfight with an official who tried to keep her son out of a 10-kilometer race in Johnston.

The requirement is 3 hours for athletes who are disabled in their arms and legs; 2 hours, 35 minutes for women in wheelchairs; and 2 hours, 10 minutes for men in wheelchairs. Pisano completed the Ocean State Marathon in 12 1/2 hours.

Marathon officials defended the qualifying time requirement, saying the race course was not designed for runners who need to be accompanied.

“The marathon has been the most public event that has put wheelchair athletes in the public view,” said Bob Hall, coordinator of the race’s wheelchair division, himself a wheelchair racer and the designer of Pisano’s 6-pound racing chair. “We owe a lot to the event. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best thing out there.”

Hall and others commend Pisano for his drive, but expressed concern for his safety on a course that winds through several towns on its way to Boston.

“My reaction was ‘Wow, this is incredible,’ starting out at midnight, going along some roads that don’t have sidewalks; I’d be afraid of getting run over,” said Joe Dowling, chairman of Wheelchair Athletics USA, the governing body for long-distance wheelchair racing. “But if the guy takes the appropriate measures to guard for his own safety, I think it’s fantastic.”

While Pisano is believed to be the first wheelchair athlete to attempt the Boston Marathon backward, he would not be the first to do it in a marathon race. Two men with cerebral palsy have completed the New York City Marathon several times by pushing themselves backward, said Dick Traum, president and founder of the New York City-based Achilles Track Club, an organization for disabled runners.

The New York race is designed for runners with special needs, and is known worldwide for providing volunteer escorts for athletes with disabilities ranging from amputated limbs and blindness to heart angina.

“Imagine you are running and you have a blister and it’s really hurting. And then all of a sudden you pass someone with one leg; you think, ‘Why should I be complaining about a blister?”’ Traum said, adding that he would be “delighted and honored if Jason would join us” for the New York City Marathon.

But it is Boston that Pisano has dreamed of, training three days a week and lifting weights five days with special contraptions designed by a friend.

He giggled as his mother described his unconventional workouts: sprints in the long aisles of UConn’s deserted library when the roads are covered with ice, and hill training at a cemetery with a particularly challenging slope.

Among the trainers behind Pisano’s workouts is John Gallo, a friend and coach who first introduced him to the weight room when the two were students at West Warwick High School.

Gallo will be beside Pisano for the marathon.

“He’s all heart, he’s all desire,” Gallo said. “He’s not the kind of kid who’s just going to give up. He’s not a quitter.”