The good news is that I’ve picked a chair that I think will suit me well. The frustrating news is that the company I want to buy it from doesn’t seem to want to sell it to me. Contact with them has been sporadic and mostly in the wrong direction. If I don’t have any success today, I’ll assume my time has been wasted and look elsewhere.
The chair I’m looking at is this one:
Kuschall K-Series
It’s the Kuschall K-Series (not to be confused with the Kuschall K-Series 2, which it frequently is).
Choosing a chair is difficult. It’s hard to tell from the specs which will better suit my needs. This is partly because those specs tend to go into unnecessary detail about the manufacture and materials which:
Are largely irrelevant to how the chair will perform in practice, and
Seem to be there mostly to distract me from the fact that most chairs are fundamentally the same.
So I made my decision based on these factors:
Price. I want to spend something in the region of £1500-£2000 on the chair. I could go higher, but from what I’ve seen, spending more than this yields diminishing returns. If I’m given a good reason to spend more, then I might, but I haven’t found one yet. Besides, if the price is in the low end of that range, I can justify optional extras.
Frame. I’d prefer a rigid frame. I understand that some folding chairs are now very good, with ingenious mechanisms to prevent movement and stress under punishment, but since I can’t try out various wheelchairs due to pandemics and the lack of suitable suppliers in the region, I’d rather not take the chance.
Adjustability. Most chairs in this price range are highly adjustable so it’s a condition that didn’t prove to be important in practice, but it was definitely a consideration. I don’t know whether a slightly different configuration might be better for speed or endurance or comfort… so I’d prefer to be able to adjust the thing depending on how I end up using it or if my needs change.
Looks. This is not entirely shallow because I spend a lot of time in the chair. A lot of people focus on it, rather than me, especially when they see me in it for the first time. I can’t help but feel self-conscious at times, so I’d prefer to like the way it looks.
Weight. In models within this price range, weight varies between ~6KG and ~10KG. Most are between 7 and 9. I’m not keen on the chair straying outside that range, but neither am I fanatical about a matter of grams. As long as I can lift the chair into the car with me unaided, I will be pleased.
Without digging into the specs, the Kuschall K-Series fits the bill. It has a rigid frame, costs a little over £1600 depending greatly on where you shop and on the main fram’e material. The K-Series comes in either aluminium, titanium or carbon… but I can see no compelling reason other than price (and looks) to choose between the three. The weight is about the same in all three cases and while some cagey claims are made about strength, I’m not buying them. Literally not buying them, I’m opting for the aluminium frame, saving some money which I’ll probably spend on extras. More on those extras later.
So today I’ll be trying for the last time to contact my so-far preferred supplier and/or looking for a new one that can match their price.
Well, a couple of things to report, otherwise I wouldn’t be reporting it. I wanted to write about my training regime in a bit more detail, but it’s been a little light for the last two days because of especially bad pain. I’m always in a lot of pain, mostly in my legs, but I can generally cope with it. But then it flares up very badly once or twice a month and things become a lot more difficult. The last three days have been days like those. Training has also been difficult because the stiffness/numbness in my hands each morning has been getting worse. I don’t know whether this is because my condition is spreading or whether I’m sleeping more heavily due to exercising more…. and simply lying on my hands or something, like a cat. But it has meant that I haven’t been able to start training as early as I’d like, which is making it harder to fit into the day.
Anyway, I’ve managed to keep to two hours a day training on the rolling road, although it’s been hell and I haven’t exactly broken any records. I’ve done enough to keep myself from stiffening up and to keep my heart at almost-but-not-quite-ready-to-explode levels of activity at various points throughout the day, which is what I believe the World Health Organisation recommends. I might be paraphrasing.
The other news is that I am almost ready to order a new wheelchair! Details are being finalised and I’ll write about them once they are. If all goes as planned, estimated delivery time will be mid-August.
I can’t see everything going as planned, though. Can you?
This post is about wheelchairs, my first (and current) wheelchair in particular. I’ll write another post about other types of equipment you might need.
When I first started to rely on a wheelchair, there was nobody to give me advice. In fact, I hired a wheelchair to get to a hospital appointment because I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle the endless corridors. The consultant was surprised and asked where I’d got the chair. Naively, I thought he was surprised that I needed a chair at all and thought it bode well for his taking my condition seriously.
I now realise that he was surprised because the chair hadn’t been issued by the hospital. I’ve had a similar reaction from every consultant I’ve seen since; I should have been assessed and, since I obviously need a wheelchair, I should at the very least have been given advice about where to get one, what type to get and what funding might be available to help me.
I didn’t. But I forgive the NHS for this since it all happened at the height of the first COVID lockdown and the NHS was chaotic and fragmented. It meant, though, that I was on my own when it came to buying a wheelchair and I had no idea what I was doing. One of the reasons I started this blog was to document what I’ve learned, so this is what I learned about buying my first wheelchair.
It’s important to note that I’m still very new at this and I still have a lot to learn.
My first wheelchair
This is what I bought. It’s described as “Excel G-Explorer All Terrain, Lightweight, Folding, Manual Self Propelled Aluminium Wheelchair”, although it’s also available under other brands and names. It cost about £350. The first order of business was to take off the crappy orange panels. You might have different priorities. I also cut off the seatbelt because it was annoying.
The Excel G-Explorer is a perfectly fine wheelchair as far as I know. I haven’t tried any others in anger since I was eight. It meets my daily needs adequately and I doubt £350 would have bought me a significantly better chair. It comes with the off-road wheels pictured. My first piece of advice if you want to be active in your chair is to get both off-road and regular wheels. The off-road ones are great on mud, grass and (light) gravel and the tyres are difficult to puncture (needless to say, I managed it anyway) but they’re heavy and generate a lot of friction. When I bought a set of regular wheels, I wasn’t quite prepared for how much of a difference they’d make on floors and pavements. Get both, if you can afford it. I now use the regular wheels all the time, unless I’m likely to be on rough ground. Badass though the off-road wheels undoubtedly look, you’re going to need regular wheels too. And – at the time of writing – they are not easy to get.
This is actually an important point: manual wheelchair wheels are quick release and can be swapped over easily by anyone sufficiently able-bodied. But there are some issues to watch out for when you’re buying wheels that are far from obvious. I’ll be posting about this soon.
The things I complain most about are the footrests. They are flimsy, plastic things. They haven’t failed yet, but it seems only a matter of time.They’re also huge and they’re annoying and they’re constantly in the way, but that’s more to do with the design of this kind of footrest in general than with these particular ones. Better chairs have better footrests and I’ll discuss that in another post. I’m just saying that however good your imagination, you probably can’t imagine how annoying crappy footrests are.
Back support is… meagre. It’s a folding chair so the back is made of fabric like a director’s chair, stretched between two supports. This is fine when I’m out and about, but I spend a lot of time in the chair and while I use an additional back cushion for support, it’s not really adequate. If you’re going to spend considerable amounts of time in your chair, I suggest looking at something more expensive. Back support is one of my motivations (because “motivations” sounds nobler than “justifications”) for buying a better chair.
One further point is that this chair requires quite a lot of (very minor) maintenance. The bolts that hold on various non-vital parts such as the footrest straps and the catches that release the spars that hold the footrests are prone to working loose, falling off and getting lost. Yes, the footrests managed to find yet another way to confusticate me. Keeping the bolts tight is a trivial matter for me because I have enough mobility in my body and fingers, but others might find it difficult. Either way, buy some spare bolts because you’re likely to need them.
Apart from those issues, the chair is fine for daily use. I’d go so far as to recommend it, since it hasn’t let me down yet. But I don’t think it will stand up much longer to the grief I’m putting it through and I don’t think it’s suitable for half marathon distances. Here’s why.
My training regime involves a minimum of two hours full tilt on Rollo, my rolling road, in addition to any other exercise or activity I do that day. If I exercise outdoors, I do between three and a half and four and a half miles, depending on what route I take. The rolling road is more strenuous because I can work faster, but the outdoors is more demanding in other ways because of the poor condition of the pavement and especially the camber. The camber alone is worth another post, which I’ll do soon.
This is causing wear and tear because the chair is a regular folding one. It isn’t designed for the stress I’m putting it through. When I’m going flat out on the rolling road, I can feel it start to warp a little, especially when I’m working each wheel alternately.
Due to all this stress, one of the wheels has developed an annoying creak. I’ve traced this to the axle mounting: a slight warp – or perhaps some imperfect engineering – has caused a small misalignment of the axle with the mounting, so when the wheel spins, the retractable pins on the chair side that hold the axle in place are rubbing against the axle mounting, causing the creak. I know this isn’t very clear, but the specifics don’t matter: suffice to say, the stress of significant training is slowly damaging the chair. I expect the damage to be cumulative, so I need anew chair that’s built to handle that kind of punishment.
Besides, I’m sitting in this chair most of the day, when I’m working as well as when I’m exercising, socialising and often when I’m relaxing. I need something that’s more comfortable, better for my back, better able to take the stress of training and that looks cooler and more badass.
Next: what I’ve learned about buying a better wheelchair.
I’m training for a wheelchair half marathon. If I can pull that off, I’ll go on to do more, and hopefully to do some full marathons. The point of this is to raise some money for charities that support women and girls who have suffered violence and abuse. The thing is, I’m new to all this. I’m new to disability, to being a wheelchair user and to distance wheelchairing (we need a better word for that. “Distance rolling” is presumably a different thing altogether, although it sounds like a great spectator sport). I’m new to fundraising in this day and age (we just used to go round with a piece of paper asking people to write down how much money they promised to give us if we did The Thing. Now it all seems more complicated.) And while I’m not new to serious training (I ran, did a lot of martial arts and played badminton fairly seriously), that was back before the old king died. I’m only just starting to get fit again.
So this is a blog about learning to do all those things. I need to learn what equipment I need, what training regimen I should follow, what times I can expect to achieve and, most importantly, I need to learn about raising money. I also need to know more about the charities and people I’m raising money for, so I can better help them. I need to learn what else I need to learn.
I’m assuming there might be others in the same boat; mid-life crisis people like me who want to get into distance… err…. wheeling(?) but don’t have fancy racing wheelchairs or belong to any wheelchair racing clubs. And people who want to raise money in this sporadic fashion. People like me who don’t really know where to begin. This blog is for those people. And for people who want to find out more about the violence and abuse that women face every single day in every country there is. People who want to find out what we can do about it.
So to begin, here is my extensive range of wheelchair marathon equipment.
This is my wheelchair. It was cheap. When I bought it, I wasn’t certain that I’d be in a chair forever, so I didn’t over-spend. In the future I might invest in a better chair, but I don’t even know what to look for or what constitutes ‘better’. I have the off-road wheels shown here and some nice, thin racing wheels (I won’t bore you with details of the tyres, even I’m not that obsessive.) There are some things I’d like to change. For example, the footrests are a constant annoyance and they and the front castors do not look sufficiently badass for my purposes. I might change those. I might get pushrims that are more grippy and a better shape. If I get really into distance…. pushing(?) I might even get a fancy racing chair. They look bloody uncomfortable, though, and how you get in and out of them is a complete mystery. They are also very expensive, so I’d have to get really, really, into endurance wheelchairing to justify that.
This is my rolling road. I call it Rollo, after the only king I will ever serve. I bought it from Invictus Active, who make them and sell other wheelchair stuff. This was not cheap, but it’s a good, well-engineered piece of kit and it means I can train indoors. I don’t have to explain how the thing works, it’s fairly self-explanatory, but I’ll write a lot here about the cons, pros and practicalities of using it every day. There’s lots of video about Rollo on the Invictus Active site if you’re curious.
These are my gloves. Actually, I have lots of different pairs of gloves and I’m not entirely happy with any of them. Either I tear then to shreds in no time or they strip the skin clean off that bit between the thumb and finger where it really bloody hurts. They also tend to get in the way of my watch, which is busy trying to measure my pulse. These ones are climbing gloves and are as sturdy as any I’ve come across, but not perfect. I’m always on the lookout for better ones.
And that’s it. That’s my kit. I expect it will change as I learn more. And if you have any suggestions, I’d really like to hear them.
