You’ve probably heard of Kevin Ogar.
On Jan. 12, 2014, a snatch gone wrong paralyzed him from the waist down. Since then, he’s become an inspiration and educator to the CrossFit community, serving as a CrossFit Level 3 Trainer, CrossFit Seminar Staff Head Trainer, and member of the Adaptive Training Academy and International Paralympic Committee.
What you might not know, however, is that he’s not the only Ogar in the adaptive-athlete community. As Yoda says, “There is another.”
Her name is Shannon Ogar. She’s married to Kevin, and like him, she’s a competitive adaptive athlete. But, as she noted after finishing Event 1 Tuesday morning, she’s “the first Ogar to make it to the Games.”
“I kind of wanted him to be salty about it … (but) you can tell he’s super proud of me,” Shannon said. The 30-year-old is competing in the women’s Neuromuscular division this week, one of three divisions in the inaugural Adaptive competition at the CrossFit Games.
It started in March of 2017, 10 days after Shannon returned to the United States from a mission trip to Ethiopia.
“I woke up and half my face didn’t work,” she recalled.
She had no sense of temperature or taste in the right side of her mouth. An athletic trainer used to helping others, Shannon wasn’t concerned. But when she “got the spins” and started having trouble walking, she went to the emergency room, where she was diagnosed with Bell’s palsy, or sudden paralysis of the nerves on one side of the face.
Most people fully recover from Bell’s palsy, “but I’m special,” Shannon joked.
Her symptoms didn’t just persist, they got worse. Doctors later determined a virus of unknown origin attacked multiple nerves in her brain, resulting in brain swelling — “10 out of 10 don’t recommend” — and vestibular ataxia, or loss of function in the vestibular system, responsible for balance and spatial orientation.
“So if I move faster than a walk, I get vertigo,” Shannon explained.
Unfortunately, moving faster than a walk was exactly what Event 1 demanded. Beginning in the WHOOP North Park Stadium, athletes had 40 minutes to run 3 miles, taking the distance in 4 laps on a course stretching through the Alliant Energy Center grounds and around the Coliseum.
Like a dry-land pirate, Shannon wore an orthoptic eye patch over her right eye — a Band-Aid-esque patch — bedecked with rainbows and unicorns and covered by a second patch made of blue fabric and strapped around her head (just one of several she owns in a variety of colors).
“You gotta accessorize,” she explained.
Eliminating input from her wandering right eye helps keep the vertigo manageable. Without it, “it’s kind of like being on a boat,” Shannon said. “While you’re spinning.”
Still, she doesn’t mind a little spinning. Not when four years ago she could barely walk.
She recalled spending three months in rehab alongside elderly stroke victims.
“Me and 75-year-old Phyllis would race around the room with our walkers,” she said, laughing.
And according to her doctors, that was as close to fitness competition as she would ever get.
“I had one doctor that was like, ‘This is your new normal. Figure it out,’” she recalled. “So I went back to the CrossFit gym.”
An athletic trainer and CrossFit athlete of about four years at that point, Shannon knew functional movement was the key to functional life.
“So, to stand upright, everybody uses three systems: You use your vision, your proprioception, and your vestibular (system),” she explained. “I don’t have a vestibular system, so I have to use the ground.”
To ground herself in space, Shannon concentrates on how her feet feel on the ground. She also focuses on non-moving spots in her line of vision, at times taping the floor or objects as a visual anchor.
Wall-ball shots, box jumps, and double-unders, however, present a more dynamic challenge. For box jumps, Shannon performs what she calls a “Spider-man jump,” placing her hands on top of the box and leaping until her knees reach her hands.
On the jump rope, “I just spot right in front of me and hold on for dear life,” she said.
While difficult, training the movements most challenging to her condition is critical for building and maintaining proficiency in everyday life, even for something as seemingly simple as staying upright.
“The more I do, the more my body learns,” she said. “As I push that boundary in the gym in a controlled setting, then in daily life, I can adapt to that.”
That’s what she wants to show the world this week: With perseverance, you can adapt to anything.
“Everybody has this moment in life where they can give up,” she said. “And I think that God has put (Kevin and me) on this Earth and kept us alive — since a lot of things have tried to kill us — to help his people, to give them kind of a little bright light and say, ‘You don't have to give up. You can absolutely cry. You can wallow. You can have bad days. But we get back up.’”
Shannon finished the 3-mile race in a tie for third in her division. It was the farthest she’s run since her diagnosis — and she PR’d her mile time doing it.
But the best part? Running across the field to the screams and cheers of the CrossFit community.
“Which is still weird for me,” Shannon said, “because I’m Kevin’s wife. (At the 2019 Games) I was his assistant and nobody knew me, and now I’ve got my name on my shirt.”
“This week, I’m my own Ogar.”
Cover photo by Charlotte Foerschler