Carlos Moleda: Anything but Average


Moleda_Detail
“Being average is my greatest fear,” says Carlos Moleda. “There’s a Navy commercial that says ‘If somebody was going to write a book about your life, do you think anyone would read it?'”

Born in Brazil in 1962, Carlos Moleda immigrated to the United States at 18, worked hard, earned his citizenship, joined the Navy and became a Navy SEAL – one of only 11 in his class who finished the grueling course. After training special-forces troops in Central and South America, in 1989, on a covert mission to capture Manuel Noriega’s plane at a Panamanian airfield, his SEAL team was caught in a massive firefight. Moleda was shot in the leg and spine at T12. Paralyzed at 27, Moleda’s story was just beginning.

“As a SEAL I loved going to work. One day I would jump out of a plane at 10,000 feet, the next I got to go and blow up stuff. It was great. I felt like Superman. When I got shot I didn’t know anything about spinal cord injuries, so my mentality was ‘I’m shot, just fix me up and I’ll go back.'” He didn’t accept that his paralysis was permanent until two months later.

Moleda (back row, second from left) with part of his Navy SEAL platoon.
Moleda (back row, second from left) with part of his Navy SEAL platoon.

When his SEAL teammates came to visit, Moleda wasn’t in the mood. “I was still pissed at the whole situation, bitching and complaining,” he says.  Then a teammate whispered in his ear, “Dude, you are still the same guy. You are still a Navy SEAL,” and put a Trident (Navy SEAL pin) in Moleda’s hand. “That’s exactly what I needed to hear at exactly the right time,” he says. “I knew either I go with it or I’m going to be miserable for the rest of my life. I told myself, ‘Dude, you can’t change it, make the best of it.'”

Moleda did his rehab at the Seattle VA. “My physical therapist, Jennifer Young, pushed me to the bone.” Young told him there was a 5K race coming up and if he completed the race she would get the VA to buy him a racing chair. “I did the 5K and I almost died.” He earned the chair and found a new goal – racing.

After rehab, Moleda moved to Virginia Beach. Now retired from the Navy with a comfortable pension, he started training and making plans to set standards in the racing world. Soon he was racing marathons. But the physical demands of wheelchair racing weren’t enough – Moleda needed mental challenges as well, so in 1993 he started classes at a community college. It was there he met Sarah Preston. “I saw her and boom – I knew she was the girl,” Moleda recalls.

Preston says of the chance encounter: “I went home and told my mom, ‘I just saw the guy I’m going to marry.'” A mutual friend officially introduced them, they fell in love, and both dropped out of college at the end of the semester. Within a year they were married, had moved to Phoenix and built a house. Sarah gave birth to a baby boy named Spencer.

Carlos went back to school and finished his associate’s degree in graphic arts. “I was going to school full-time from morning until evening, then I would go into my studio in the garage and do homework.” Degree in hand, he started designing websites. Long hours of study and work took their toll on his family. Alone with a new baby, far from her family, Sarah went into a serious depression.

“At first I didn’t understand it,” Carlos says. “I look at a problem and try and find an answer. I didn’t understand that you can’t just make depression go away.” They moved back east, eventually settling in Bluffton, S.C., so Sarah would be close to her parents and friends. It was a good move. Sarah improved and Carlos became close with her dad.

Always Up for a Challenge
In 1996 Moleda read about a para named John Franks attempting the Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii – a one-day race consisting of a 2.5-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a marathon. Moleda set a two-year goal to train, compete and win the wheelchair division of Ironman. “If I train for a race or an event, my goal is to win it.”

Moleda won the 2004 Ironman after being in bed with a pressure sore for three years.
Moleda won the 2004 Ironman after being in bed with a pressure sore for three years.

“Carlos is a ‘blinders kind of guy,’ Sarah says. “Once he decides on a goal, nothing gets in his way.”

The next four years were a blur of training, competing and starting a successful business. Moleda won the 1999 Midnight Sun 367-mile, nine-day stage race, took first in the U.S. Handcycling Championships in 1999 and 2000, and won the Ironman World Championships in 1998-99.

In the 2000 Ironman, Moleda’s rival, David Bailey, was ahead in the handcycle section and got a flat. Instead of grabbing an easy victory, Moleda stopped and waited for Bailey to change his tire. Then they went mano-a-mano in the marathon. Bailey pulled ahead and won. “It was the best race I ever lost,” Moleda says.  “On that day the crowd saw us as two racers battling it out, not two guys in chairs.”

Photo by Bob Vogel
Photo by Bob Vogel

Moleda’s ’98 Ironman victory had put his already busy schedule into overdrive. People started asking him about buying wheelchair sports equipment. He combined his passion for racing with his web design experience and started High Performance Mobility, one of the first online wheelchair sports outlets. The timing was perfect. His Ironman win caught the eye of Challenged Athletes Foundation, a non-profit that provides funding for equipment, training, programs and events for athletes with disabilities. The CAF hired Moleda’s company to fill its orders and brought him onboard to be a CAF spokesperson.

But Moleda’s nonstop drive was taking a toll on his family life. “It was a big struggle for us because my mind was so focused on racing that Sarah and Spencer felt like they were number two – behind Ironman. I would be gone all day training, and then I was working on my bike and on my chair and that’s all I talked about. It gets old, living with somebody like that.”

In 2001, two days before a triathlon in Brazil, Moleda was sitting on a shower bench that collapsed. He landed on concrete on his right ischium (pelvic bone). The next day it was bruised, swollen the size of an orange. Moleda knew it was bad but felt pressured to race. “I had been in the news, magazines, and on TV. I was the hit of a small town where the race was being held. They had flown me there to do this, and I didn’t want to disappoint them. So I taped it up and raced anyway.”

By the end of the race the bruise had torn open, and it quickly got infected. On the flight home he was running a high fever and fighting chills. “It was stupid. If I could do it again, I would have never done the race.”

The decision to race cost Moleda three surgeries and three years in bed. The plastic surgeon who did his first two surgeries wasn’t a specialist in skin flaps and didn’t pull enough tissue to give his skin the elasticity it needed for him to bend. Moleda’s “recovery” was a roller coaster nightmare – surgery, then down in bed for seven months, and two months later it would tear apart, requiring another surgery and another seven-month recovery.

Three days after his first surgery, Moleda was sent home, even though he had osteomyelitis in his right ischium. At first the VA sent a nurse to Moleda’s house daily.

But Sarah knew Carlos and his body better than anybody. She studied up on how to care for Carlos and took over. Nurse visits switched to once a week. “I was changing his IVs, taking care of his PICC lines and changing his dressings,” Sarah says. “The infection was so aggressive that for six weeks I was changing his IV antibiotics every three hours, round the clock. He had chills and nausea and was so sick I don’t know how he survived it. I really don’t.”

Family or Career?
After Moleda’s second surgery tore apart, he found a specialist with lots of experience doing skin flaps. During the third surgery the specialist shaved down Moleda’s right ischium and pulled plenty of extra skin to allow the flap to hold while bending. This time the skin completely healed in three months.

“The whole ordeal was miserable, but I would think about the things I planned to do when I got better, that’s how I got through it.” He also gives praise to Sarah. “It was a huge toll on Sarah. She’s the only one I trust to care for me. I trust her with everything 100 percent.”

For Moleda, the pressure sore was an epiphany. “It made me realize I wasn’t alone in a race, I wouldn’t be there without the support of a lot of people. It also made me realize how lucky I was to have my family and how I have to be more sensitive to people and to find a balance and share my time.”

Celebrating with wife Sarah and son Spencer.
Celebrating with wife Sarah and son Spencer.

Despite Carlos’ racing schedule being hard on the family, and at times on their marriage, Sarah knew that it would be harder on Carlos if he stopped. After healing from the third surgery, when Carlos said he would quit competing, Sarah told him, “You don’t have to do Ironman, but racing is who you are. You are going to be miserable if you’re not racing.”

Carlos returned to racing with a vengeance. He went back to Hawaii and won the 2004 and 2005 Ironman. In 2009 he was part of the first four-man handcycle team that successfully completed the Race Across America, a 3,000-mile race from Oceanside, Calif., to Annapolis, Md., in eight days.

Unfortunately, shaving his right ischium put extra pressure on his left side. Without a modified cushion to address the change, the left ischium became compromised. While boarding a plane home after RAAM, he accidentally hit the left ischium and it broke down – requiring another ischiectomy and a skin flap. This time the flap healed within three months.

On the advice of another competitor, Moleda flew to Colorado to have custom Ride Design/Aspen Seat Cushions made for his everyday chair, racing chair and off-road handcycle. “I learned from it,” Moleda says. “I check my skin with a mirror at least once a day. And I have a cushion under my butt at all times, in the car, shower, everywhere.” He also had the back of all his jeans replaced with lycra so there are no pressure points. “It’s been almost a year since my last surgery and so far, so good.”

At 47, Moleda is trying to find a balance. Mornings are office time. Afternoons are for training. Evenings are family time. “We eat together every night, we sit down and talk, ask how everybody’s day went, and we are together all evening. Maybe we watch a movie on the couch or go to grandma’s house. On the weekends we are together a lot. We travel south, spend weekends at Disney, or visit Sarah’s mom or do regular stuff like cut the grass.”

Photo by Bob Vogel
Photo by Bob Vogel

He is also focusing on giving back and helping get people involved in sports. He does clinics with CAF, and is very involved with their Operation Rebound, helping returning war veterans. “It’s easier for them to hear from somebody like me who has been in combat and has a disability.” He also tries to pass on some of his hard-earned life lessons. “When I coach, I try and tell people that racing is just temporary. Family is permanent. And they have to lead a balanced life.” And he is evangelical about looking at people’s cushions and warning about avoiding pressure sores.

Although Moleda is striving for balance, he is hardly slowing down. In July he is heading to Angola to oversee a huge sports equipment shipment purchased from his company to start a Paralympic wheelchair sports program. He’ll travel around the country, check out the facilities, set up guidelines, training schedules and put on sports clinics to help start the program. In October he has plans to join his teammates from RAAM and do a 7.5-day road race across Australia. And he’s already making plans to do a 150-mile, off-road handcycle race in the Simpson Desert in the Australian Outback in 2011.

Why does he keep pushing after having been through so much?

“Every day I’m looking for a challenge, looking for a way to make my life richer so at any point I can look back and say, ‘Yeah, I’m OK with that. It wasn’t an average life.'”

 


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