Army veteran Shawn Cheshire doesn’t like to feel limited, so she’s found innovative, inspiring ways to life her life since losing her sight in an accident while working as a paramedic at age 36.
“If you want to know who I am and what I stand for, just look at how I live,” she says.
To wit: she competed in the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro and became a 13-time U.S. Champion in paracycling. In 2021, she spent 60 straight days riding a single (not tandem) bicycle across the United States — a 3,600-mile journey chronicled in the documentary “Blind AF.”
She went on to power her bicycle over 2,000 miles from Canada to Mexico, and last year, she set a record time for paralympic athletes by completing a 23-mile, rim-to-rim hike across the Grand Canyon without a guide in under 11 hours.
“The mentality can’t be, ‘What can I or can’t I do?’” Cheshire says. “It’s more of, ‘If I want to do something, how would I do it?’”
It was a tough question to face in the immediate aftermath of becoming blind due to a traumatic brain injury sustained in 2010 in the back of an ambulance during a snowstorm.
“It is incredible how much we take for granted our independence as sighted individuals. I was a strong, independent single parent and lost all kinds of independence with this injury,” she recalls. “I was really depressed and all I could think about was dying.”
After battling complex PTSD through an adaptive program at a VA hospital in which she trained for half marathons, Cheshire started her next chapter. When someone told her she’d never be good enough to compete in the Paralympic Games, it proved to be the impetus she needed to prove them wrong.
Getting A Guide Dog
Another pivotal choice was choosing to partner with a guide dog, a German shepherd named Nick, in 2020. Cheshire hadn’t considered it until she and a friend were shopping in a mall and stopped by a table hosted by the nonprofit Guiding Eyes for the Blind.
“A woman named Lisa tried to talk to me about a guide dog, and I’m like, ‘I’m not a dog person. I can barely take care of myself. I don’t know if I can take care of a dog,’” she recalls. “She said, ‘You can try it and if doesn’t work, it’s not like they’re going to leave the dog with you, stuck there forever.’”
So Cheshire applied for a guide dog and partnered with Nick, who has “absolutely” increased her independence. The “spunky” service dog not only guides her to doors, stairs, chairs, escalators, curbs and other objects she asks him to find, but helps with her PTSD by waking her from nightmares and reflecting her emotional state.
“Nick is literally my emotional barometer,” she says. “If Nick doesn’t seem to be OK and I can’t figure out why, that’s my signal to look at myself and think about how I’m feeling — what’s my anxiety? What’s my fear? Because nine out of ten times, it has more to do with me than him. It’s an incredible bond. Once you bond with these dogs, it is unbelievable how magnificent they are.”
Moving Forward
Nick joins Cheshire when she’s training for her adventures, hiking on trails near their home in Flagstaff, Arizona, or swimming while she paddleboards. He stayed with a Guiding Eyes for the Blind trainer during her bike ride across the U.S. because it wouldn’t be feasible for him to run it.
She started that journey by dipping her bike’s wheels in the Pacific Ocean from Florence, Oregon, and ended by being reunited with Nick the night she finished in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where she dipped her wheels in the Atlantic Ocean.
The key to the ride was unlikely: music. A wireless JBL speaker on the back of the lead bike played tunes nonstop (which is inaudible in the movie because of copyright considerations).
“We were just listening to hip hop and dance music and anything that I could hear with the wind and the traffic noise,” she says. “That was like my blind line of sight. I could tell how far I was from the lead bike and not get too close.”
She also had a two-way radio in her helmet to communicate with the lead bike, follow car and film crew.
“They were always giving me feedback as to how close I was to the rumble strip or to the edge of the road or to the guard rail,” she says. “So I was just constantly thinking about all the sounds and staying focused on the music and listening to what the crew was saying. And then really trying not to be overwhelmed and scared by the wind or semi-trucks or all of the other stuff. It was a lot.”
Cheshire hopes the film, which was directed by Gina LeVay and screened April 7 as part of the ReelAbilities NY Film Festival, inspires audiences from any walk of life.
“I hope that people can hear and maybe feel that no matter how bad it gets, there’s still a way through,” she says. “There’s always a way through.”
