I bought a racing wheelchair!

Here it is:

Although I think mine will be blue. Hopefully, I’ll have it by the end of the week.

Choosing a racing wheelchair seems to be almost as pitfall-ridden as choosing a day chair. That’s why I was advised to join a club. Clubs can advise you on what options are available and help you choose between them. I’m not much of a joiner, though, and while there are some wheelchair athletics clubs in the region, the ones I looked at a few months ago didn’t seem to be very active of late.

So I bought this one, the Flying Start, from https://www.motivation.org.uk for what currently seem like excellent reasons. We’ll see how that works out. Those reasons are:

• Price: the Flying Start is considerably cheaper than most, coming in at well under £900 delivered. I’ve seen other chairs costing more than ten times that amount. That would be a huge investment, especially since there’d be no way to tell whether that chair would be right for me long-term. I’m more than happy to buy this cheaper model, learn from it, and buy a better one in a year or two if necessary. I can always donate it to a club if I upgrade.
• Flexibility: The chair can be configured for kneeling or sitting. Many seem to be kneeling-only, which would not be appropriate for me. In both configurations, the seat and footrest can be set to different heights and angles, which should compensate well enough for it’s not being built to my exact measurements.
• Charity: https://www.motivation.org.uk is a charity, which does some great work, as you can see here. 100% of the profit from the chair will go to the charity. They’re all about providing wheelchairs appropriate to the needs and environments of disabled people around the world and working with the infrastructures of those countries to get the right chairs to the people who need them. The main reason they designed a racing chair in the first place was so that clubs could buy cheap chairs to lend to disadvantaged members who could not afford their own.

I had more or less decided on the Flying Start for the first two reasons, but after I read about the third, there was no other choice to make. Seriously, have a look at their projects and strategy, some impressive clear thinking and – above all – listening has been done.

I’m expecting it to take some time to get used to the chair. I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to use it in the Sheffield half marathon in March (although I hope so). The pushrims are much smaller than on a day chair, of course, but the main difficulty is going to be the steering. There’s a lever at the front to steer and I’ll have to take at least one hand off the wheels to operate it. I’m used to steering with the wheels themselves, of course, like a tank, so I expect I’ll end up leaving skin on a few walls before I’m competent for a public appearance.

Have a look at the https://www.motivation.org.uk site and donate to them if you can. But only after donating to my own crowdfunder, of course…

As always, take a look at my fundraising page. I’m doing wheelchair half marathons (hopefully three this year, plus sundry 10k events) to raise money for nia, a women-led, women-only, secular, rights-based registered charity which has been delivering services to women, girls and children who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse, including prostitution, since 1975.