What does it mean to overcome adversity?  Thanks to participation in a documentary on extreme sports filmed by Crispin Kerr-Dineen, I had a chance to study an example  of someone who overcame adversity and made it to the top of the heap. I am referring to Wendy Larson a professional hand cyclist who won the Boston and the NY marathon in the woman’s hand cycling division.

That alone is impressive, but what makes this story so interesting, compelling and heroic is that she was once wheelchair-bound, having been born with Primary Immune Deficiency Disease and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. And to add injury to insult, she had a serious car accident a few years ago which entailed 15 surgeries in order to save her leg.

The initial question posed to me by the documentarian was related  to Wendy’s obsessive drive, which pushed her to achieve victories in these excruciating endurance races that required unbelievable pain tolerance.  The standard psychoanalytic interpretation of this kind of behavior is to say it is a reaction formation against  dependency. Many patients will react to their injury or illness by fighting against assuming the sick role, ignore doctor’s orders to rest and carry on in a steadfast, stubborn  and determined way until  they collapse. Reaction formation is a midlevel neurotic defense and can lead to re-injury.

As my interview with this filmmaker went along, however, it began to occur to me that the arc of Wendy Larson’s career  took her far beyond a reaction formation against dependency. As she continues to win races and act as an heroic  role model for the millions of handicapped people around the world, a better way to describe and to analyze Wendy Larson is to think about the highest level defense mechanism called altruism.

Altruism is defined as the constructive and gratifying gift-giving  service to others. And isn’t that what Wendy Larson is doing? She is giving a gift to the world by setting an example to how to overcome adversity and setbacks. Wendy has what the filmmaker referred to as telos , the Aristotelian concept which means purpose, goal or intention. Having telos means that one is engaged in a goal that one is meant to do. Telos is like a calling, the term Joseph Campbell frequently used in his book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.”

When George Lucas made “Star Wars,” he used Joseph Campbell as a consultant and when Luke Skywalker got that 3-D message from Princess Leia to come and help her, that  became Skywalker’s calling. Like so many heroes Luke Skywalker refused his telos, his calling, for a while until he finally mustered the courage to embrace it.

That could be the story of Wendy Larson as well. Perhaps when she was younger she refused the calling  to heroism and to be a role model for  all of the handicapped people in the world. After all, who wants to be a pioneer out there all alone, ahead of the pack, suffering in pain and agony.  But finally she had enough of the discouraging diagnosis and the limits set on her by her physical state and by her doctors.  She describes the moment when she accepted the call to heroism when a doctor told her she would never run in a marathon ever again. She said “something clicked inside of me when he told me that and I said to myself  ‘enough’ of this bad news.”

And from then until now she has been peddling away on her hand cycle, an inspiration to anyone who is handicapped with illness or injury. It may be that initially we could say she was using reaction formation to defend against the  sick role given to her by peddling away from it as fast as she could. But somewhere along the way, she found her destiny, her telos and her purpose.

Her purpose appears to be that of a hero, a pioneer or one of those mystics who carry the torch for humanity and show us the way.  She is one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s lantern bearers, those who dream and keep the flame alive for the rest of us to follow. Wendy Larson is a true lantern-bearer and she has come a long way from adversity and has transcended diagnosis, pain and her wheelchair into the world of the hero. Thank goodness she answered the call.