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Pair works to help others regain mobility

While Todd Schaffhauser and Dennis Oehler have both enjoyed careers as Paralympic atheletes, setting world records and winning gold medals in track and field, the pair continue to help thousands of amputees regain their mobility through their Amputee Walking School program.

The pair served as the featured speakers during the recent February Manchester Area Chamber of Commerce luncheon, talking about their careers competing in the Paralympic Games, as well as their rehabilitation program.

“Dennis and myself we have been working together for 35 years,” Schaffhauser said. “We were both paralympic gold medalists and world record holders.”

Competing in three Paralympic Games, both Schaffhauser and Oehler retired from competition following the 1996 Paralympic Games to concentrate their efforts on their program, known simply as The Amputee Walking School.

“It started out basically just to help people reach their life skill goals,” Schaffhauser said. “You have a lot of people who after they lose a limb, they go through physical therapy, but they run out of time.”

The rehabilitation program traces its roots back to 1988, beginning essentially as a running clinic to help train Paralympic athletes for competition.

“Paralympics were in such an infancy stage, nobody knew what they were, not many people were actually competing, but we decided to go out and try to recruit more potential athletes to go and compete in Paralympic competition,” Schaffhauser said.

Schaffhauser, a Long Island native, said it was actually a trip to Nashville, Tennessee in 1986 that changed his life and made him want to pursue a career as a Paralympic athlete.

“What was really special about Tennessee though was that when I first lined up and I saw the field and that gun went off and I stepped out of my starting blocks and I went and I looked up, the whole field was already halfway down the track because I was still a beginner,” he said. “When I saw everyone just really kind of blow me away I was blown away by just what they were able to do.”

“To me, that race, right then, right there changed my life because I saw it could be done and I wanted to know, how could I do it,” Schaffhauser added.

Two years later, Schaffhauser returned to compete in the 1988 Paralympic Games, winning a gold medal and setting a world record in the process. A 12-year career competing in Track and Field for the United States would follow.

Oehler said he was just two weeks away from signing a contract to play professional soccer when he lost his leg in an automobile accident at the age of 24.

“At 24 years old, it was all right there, I was going to be a professional athlete and you talk about just giving up on life, you know,” he said.

Oehler said he spent the next three months shut off from the rest of the world not wanting to leave his house or do anything, when a friend took him to the 1984 International Games for the Disabled.

“I didn’t want to have anything to do with it, it wasn’t even called the Paralympics back then,” he said.

It was during a 400-meter race that Oehler watched Paralympic athletes flying around the track and realized they were no different from him.

“As they came off the turn I looked down and I realized they are exactly like me,” he said. “Single below the knee amputees running a quarter mile in 62 seconds.”

It was a far cry from what he thought his reality would be before witnessing that event.

“Folks, in the 1980s I thought I was never going to walk again, literally, because in the 80s you never saw people walking around with artificial legs during the summertime,” Oehler said. “They would hide their disability; they would wear long pants.”

What he did see were people in wheelchairs with missing limbs, and he thought that was what his existence would be.

“After seeing that I realized in that single moment in time, I realized one day I was going to walk, one day I was going to learn to jog, run and maybe become a competitive athlete and that was when I met (Schaffhauser) in 1986,” Oehler said.

“It gave us a platform to be able to help people and this is what we have been doing for 35 years, so why do we continue to do what we do,” he said.