Show Notes
About the Guest(s)
Zachary Fenell is a speaker, marathoner, and author who actively champions disability advocacy. Fenell, known as the “Cerebral Palsy Vigilante,” uses multiple platforms to dispel misconceptions and inspire others to see possibilities beyond their circumstances. He has written two notable books: Off Balanced, a memoir about living with cerebral palsy, and Rock Realities, which compiles his interviews with Indie and Alternative Rock musicians. Fenell completed a full marathon despite the challenges posed by his condition, further cementing his role as an inspirational figure within the disability community.
Episode Summary
In this episode of the Think Inclusive Podcast, Tim Villegas interviews Zachary Fenell, also known as the Cerebral Palsy Vigilante. Zachary, a passionate disability advocate, author, and marathoner, shares his extraordinary journey of training for and completing a full marathon despite having cerebral palsy. They discuss the challenges he faced, his meticulous training regimen, and the broader implications of his achievement for disability rights and perceptions.
Throughout the conversation, Zachary Fenell talks about his motivation, inspired by author John W. Quinn, and how he overcame numerous physical and logistical challenges during his marathon training. He provides insights into the specific accommodations he required, including the use of a cane and special orthotics. Moreover, he touches on the significance of being called an inspiration and the importance of respecting personal limitations while pushing for greater inclusivity. The episode closes with Fenell discussing his future plans, including another marathon, a potential new memoir, and his ongoing contributions to Think Inclusive.
Read the transcript (auto-generated and edited with help from AI for readability)
Zachary Fenell:
Hi, I’m Zach, and you are listening to the Think Inclusive Podcast.
Tim Villegas:
Recording from my office in beautiful Marietta, Georgia, you are listening to the Think Inclusive Podcast, episode 17.
Today we have speaker, marathoner, and author of two books, Zachary Fenell. The first, Off Balanced, is a memoir about what it was like growing up and living with cerebral palsy. The second, Rock Realities, is a compilation of 13 interviews he did with indie and alternative rock musicians.
We discuss his most recent endeavor—completing a marathon—and all of the challenges that came up for him as a person with cerebral palsy. After the podcast, please visit patreon.com/thinkinclusivepodcast where you can support our goal to bring you in-depth interviews with inclusive education and community advocacy thought leaders.
Also, you can help other people find us by giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the Think Inclusive Podcast. So without further ado, here is the interview.
Alright, I’d like to welcome Zachary Fenell to the Think Inclusive Podcast. He is also known as the Cerebral Palsy Vigilante. He is a disability advocate who uses multiple platforms to dispel misconceptions and encourages everyone to examine the possible.
He recently completed a marathon. That is why I wanted to have Zach on—to talk about his experience, his training, and how that informs what we know about disability or disability rights. So thanks for being on the podcast, Zach.
Zachary Fenell:
My pleasure. I’m excited to be here.
Tim Villegas:
Now, if you’ve been either a long-time reader or a long-time listener to Think Inclusive, you know that Zachary has been a contributor since practically the beginning of Think Inclusive. So Zach and I go way back.
But this is the first time we’ve actually had a chance to record an interview. So I’m really excited about this. We actually haven’t caught up in a while, so why don’t I ask you, Zach—what have you been up to for the last six months to a year?
Zachary Fenell:
Six months to a year, let’s see. Where to start. Since the summer—you mentioned the marathon—I’ve been training heavily for that. Back in May, I started working part-time at our local library, the Beachwood Public Library, as a page. So I’ve been doing that part-time and keeping my purpose with my own blog in addition to contributing to Think Inclusive’s website.
I have my own blog at zacharyfenell.com. Recently, I received a couple of honors. One was being named among the 100 best disability blogs by Stairlifts UK. And then HealthUnlocked shortlisted me—out of 100 blogs nominated, I was one of 30 shortlisted for one of their health blogger awards.
What was really neat about that was that it wasn’t just cerebral palsy, which is the disability I focus on a lot, or just any disability. It was a health blogger award, not just a disability blog award. So the two fields have a lot of commonality, but at the same time, when you open it up from disability to health blogging, you’re opening it up to a larger field. To be even shortlisted among the blogs considered was an honor.
Tim Villegas:
Wow, that’s amazing. Congratulations on that.
Zachary Fenell:
Thank you.
Tim Villegas:
So it sounds like you’ve been pretty busy.
Zachary Fenell:
Yeah.
Tim Villegas:
Let’s talk specifically about the marathon, because I know that is something you just finished. That was last week, correct?
Zachary Fenell:
Yeah.
Tim Villegas:
Go ahead.
Zachary Fenell:
Actually, at the time of us recording this podcast, I would have been in the final two and a half miles on the way to the finish line. So the timing of it—there’s parallel timing there.
Tim Villegas:
Yeah, so you’d be in the home stretch.
Zachary Fenell:
Yes.
Tim Villegas:
So let’s talk a little bit about how you trained. And then after that, maybe just the experience of running the marathon. Because this isn’t actually your first marathon. You did a half marathon previously, is that correct?
Zachary Fenell:
Correct. In 2016, the Towpath Marathon is the name of the event. They have a 10K, a half marathon, and a full marathon in October. I did the half marathon that year—13.1 miles. After I completed that, my friend who did the marathon with me this year challenged me: “What are you going to do now?” I was just kind of like, “Well, my goal was to do the half.” So I didn’t really have an answer. He kept pushing me to do the marathon, encouraging me.
I finally said, “I’ll do the marathon if you do it with me.” And he said, “Okay.” One day I got a text from him early in the morning showing me that he had registered for the Towpath full marathon. I was like, “Okay, this is real now.” I got with my training and started moving forward with that.
Tim Villegas:
That’s so awesome. In case you don’t know how hard it is to prepare for something like that—just for your body to be used to being in motion for that long—I had the privilege of running a half marathon in 2015, and I trained. But it was definitely time-consuming. It took a lot of wear and tear on your body. But it was a great experience.
So I want to hear from you—what inspired you, or what prompted you to even go down the road of doing these marathons, from the half marathon to the full marathon?
Zachary Fenell:
It really all starts back in the spring of 2011. I was hanging out with a couple of friends weekly, and they were training for a triathlon. At the same time, I was reading a book, Someone Like Me: An Unlikely Story of Challenge and Triumph Over Cerebral Palsy by John W. Quinn. John has cerebral palsy like me. He spent 20 years in the Navy, reaching the second-highest rank, all while hiding his CP.
Reading his story really made me feel like, “Wow, I want to do something physically challenging.” Just reading what John wrote—how much of a physical challenge he went through—motivated me to want to do something physically challenging.
The friends I was hanging out with at the time were doing triathlons. I don’t ride a bike, so my thought was, “Well, I’ll do a marathon.” I asked, “How long is a marathon?” They said, “26.2 miles.” So I said, “Well, I’ll do a half marathon.” Because in my mind, it was unreasonable. “Oh, that’s a lot. I can’t do a marathon.” So I said, “I’ll do a half marathon.”
Fast forward a couple of years, and I really wasn’t making too much progress on the goal. It was something I kept saying I was going to do, but didn’t do. Then I did a one-mile walk. I’m a huge Cleveland Indians fan. They had an event at Progressive Field, their home field, where the last mile of a 5K and one-mile fun walk ended on the field. That was in 2014. That gave me the taste of what I needed to motivate myself to get serious about going after a half marathon.
I started training. It took me two years to get to the point where I could do the half marathon. When I first started training, the most I could do was 4 1/3 miles, and then I was completely wiped out. Completely exhausted.
A month before that half marathon, my friend James—who I did the marathon with—had me come in to speak to his cross-country team at a local high school. Afterward, he and the other coaches were asking me, “What’s next?” I said, “The goal is the half.” I still considered it unreasonable to do a marathon. I told myself, “It’s unreasonable to do a marathon. I have CP. I exert extra energy with each step. I’ll get exhausted faster.”
But James kept persisting. Finally, I said, “I’ll do it if you do it.” That led us to June 2017. James registered, and I said, “Okay. No excuses. I told him if he did it, I would do it.”
So I started training. The first thing I did was get out regularly—three times a week, walking about six miles. Just to get my body used to being tired. So that by the time I did the actual full marathon, instead of letting myself shut down, I’d be like, “Okay, I’m used to this. I can persevere through the fatigue.”
Zachary Fenell:
At the same time, I started reaching out to anyone I knew who had marathon experience to get advice. John Quinn, the author I mentioned, had done a marathon, so I reached out to him. I have a friend, Michael Minozzi, who represented the United States in race walking. I asked him for advice. James had a friend, Shawn, who had done marathons, and I asked him too—“What do I need to do? What do I need to eat?”
That’s one of the things that woke me up about training for a marathon. It isn’t just putting on miles and building endurance. It really is a lifestyle change. You have to eat more calories to fuel your body. One of the pieces of advice they gave me was, “Train when you’re going to do the race.”
The Towpath Marathon has a walkers and runners registration. I registered to walk it. Walkers can start at 7 a.m., and the course technically closes at 2 p.m. That’s when their permit ends and the course opens back up to the public.
I contacted Towpath and said I thought it would take me longer than that. I asked if I could start at 5:30 a.m., and they worked with me to set that up. So I trained early in the morning, increasing my miles from six to doing half-marathon distances a couple times a week, simulating the environment.
I used canes to complete the marathon. Early on, I trained without them to see if I could do it. I worried that using a cane would cheat me out of some of the workout. But I realized that when you choose to do a marathon, you’re not cheating yourself out of anything. My legs were still getting the workout—the cane just helped with balance.
John told me, “Train in what you’re going to wear. Train with the equipment you’re going to use.” So I started using the cane after a couple of months. I had a couple of falls during training, especially around the 9–10 mile mark. I realized it was due to exhaustion, so I started training with the cane consistently.
Tim Villegas:
Yeah. You kind of answered a few of the questions I had, like how many times a week you trained—three times per week. Was there anything you did that was different or unique because of your CP?
Zachary Fenell:
There were a couple of things. One of the biggest obstacles was time. I expected to do three miles per hour, so finding time to train was difficult. I started with six miles three times a week, then increased to doing half-marathon distances twice a week.
The last month of training, especially the last two weeks, I was told by John and Mike that I should be able to do 20 miles before the marathon. “If you can do 20, you can do 26.2.” I never actually got to 20 because of time. I went back to doing 9–10 miles three times a week. I felt strong, but there was still a little doubt because I’d never done a full marathon before.
To train to that level, I would’ve needed to find seven hours at a time. With my part-time job and everything else, it was hard to find that time.
Tim Villegas:
Right. So how long did it take you to finish the marathon on Sunday?
Zachary Fenell:
It took me 11 hours, 40 minutes, and 31 seconds. I expected to finish in eight and a half hours, but that was blown out of proportion. I was walking for nearly half a day.
I think the three-hour difference came from listening to my body. Around the 10-mile mark, my right ankle started bothering me. I stopped, cleared out some debris from my shoe, worked my ankle a bit, and continued. I didn’t try to overdo it. I respected what my body was telling me. That’s probably where the time difference came from.
We saw other people being carted off the course due to injuries. You have to respect what your body is telling you. But I did finish.
Tim Villegas:
Now, did you have any other unique gear besides your cane?
Zachary Fenell:
One thing that wouldn’t be obvious from the Facebook Live videos—I have a half-inch leg discrepancy. My left leg is a half-inch longer than my right. So I have foot orthotics in my right shoe to compensate. That’s something I use daily. But outside of that, nothing special that you would’ve seen in the video.
Tim Villegas:
I also saw people cheering you on and calling you an inspiration. Were there people who knew you were doing this and came specifically to cheer you on?
Zachary Fenell:
It was a combination. That day, our local paper, The Plain Dealer, ran a story about my training. Some passersby said, “I saw you in the paper this morning.”
I also invited friends to cheer me to the finish. That was a mental motivator—knowing people were waiting for me. I told them to show up between 1:30 and 2 p.m., expecting to finish around 2. But once a couple of friends heard I was behind schedule, they decided to come find me. I was around mile 19 or 20. They walked the final four miles with James and me. They’re in the Facebook Live video of my finish.
That made the last four miles a lot more fun.
Tim Villegas:
I wanted to ask you about being called an inspiration. Some disability advocates are uncomfortable with that. What’s your take?
Zachary Fenell:
I used to have that mindset—“Just because I have a disability doesn’t make me an inspiration.” I understand that. But three years ago, I visited my aunt in Tucson, Arizona. She had leukemia and was given two months to live. She had always been one of my biggest supporters.
One night, we were talking, and she called me an inspiration. I called her one too. She didn’t consider herself an inspiration, and I didn’t either. But that’s when I realized—it’s in the eye of the beholder.
If someone says you’re an inspiration, I ask, “What makes me an inspiration to you?” I’m okay with being called an inspiration for doing the marathon—especially if it motivates someone else.
One biker passed us after the course reopened to the public. She later found my name on the results page, went to my website, and wrote me. She had done four marathons herself. She said, “As a perfectly able-bodied person, I know how difficult it is to do a marathon.” She found me inspirational for even attempting what I once considered unreasonable. I’m okay with that.
Sometimes people mistake being in awe for being inspired. If someone says, “I could never do that,” they’re in awe—but they’re not necessarily inspired to go out and do something themselves. Inspiration should spur action.
Tim Villegas:
Yeah, I like that perspective. Not being content with just being called an inspiration, but really digging into what that means to the person—and whether it leads to action.
I have a couple more questions. When you were in the race, did you feel like the marathon was accessible to you? You mentioned asking for an earlier start time. Were they accommodating?
Zachary Fenell:
The Towpath course is pretty flat, which is why I chose it. They were very accommodating. The person who responded to my email—Kathy—had a nephew who passed away from cerebral palsy. That may have made her more understanding.
They gave me the opportunity to finish. I kept a group of people working three hours past their normal time just to see me finish.
Around mile 16, I stopped at an aid station. After I drank some water, I asked, “Keep going this way?” The volunteer was surprised—“You’re continuing on?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Go that way.” I think some people were surprised I didn’t drop out, but no one pushed that on me.
I did fall twice—mile 3 and mile 16. In mile 3, I tripped over a monkey ball from a tree. But I think it would be impossible to expect them to clear all debris. Overall, they were very accommodating.
Tim Villegas:
That’s great. So I’m going to ask what a lot of people probably ask—what’s next for Zachary Fenell?
Zachary Fenell:
There’s a lot next. I’d like to get my marathon time under 10 hours. James and I are already talking about doing the Towpath again next year. I’ll keep training to increase my pace.
From the response I’ve received, I’m also thinking about writing a second memoir about the marathon journey. I share my story not to brag, but to hopefully help others see what they once thought was impossible and go after it.
Tim Villegas:
That’s fantastic. Good luck with the memoir.
Zachary Fenell:
I’ll also be contributing to Think Inclusive again. Training took me away for a bit, but I’ll be back.
Tim Villegas:
That’s good news for us. I also want to mention to everyone listening that Zachary’s first memoir, Off Balanced, is available on Amazon and on your website, right?
Zachary Fenell:
Yes, all the information is on my website.
Tim Villegas:
Do you want to plug anything else—Facebook, Twitter?
Zachary Fenell:
Sure! You can find me on Twitter @zacharyfenell. My Facebook page is facebook.com/authorzacharyfenell. I also have a YouTube channel—youtube.com/zacharyfenell. I post a video every week. I always enjoy getting feedback from viewers and readers, so feel free to reach out.
Tim Villegas:
Alright, Zachary Fenell, thank you for being on the Think Inclusive Podcast.
Zachary Fenell:
It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Tim Villegas:
That is our show. We would like to thank speaker and author Zachary Fenell. Make sure you check out his website, zacharyfenell.com, and you can find him on Facebook and Twitter.
Follow Think Inclusive on the web at thinkinclusive.us, as well as on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Instagram.
Today’s show was produced by myself, talking into USB headphones, a Zoom H1 handy recorder, MacBook Pro, GarageBand, and a Skype account.
You can also subscribe to the Think Inclusive Podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, or Podomatic.com—the largest community of independent podcasters on the planet.
From Marietta, Georgia, please join us again on the Think Inclusive Podcast. Thanks for your time and attention.
Key Takeaways
- Motivation and Inspiration: Fenell was inspired by author John W. Quinn and his determination to do something physically challenging, despite his condition.
- Training with Cerebral Palsy: His training regimen included using a cane for balance and special orthotics to compensate for leg length discrepancy, highlighting the need for specific accommodations.
- Marathon Experience: Completing the marathon took 11 hours and 40 minutes, showcasing his grit and the importance of pacing and respecting one’s physical limits.
- Inclusion and Accessibility: The Towpath Marathon was accommodating by allowing early starts, emphasizing the need for inclusive practices in events.
- Future Aspirations: Fenell aims to run another marathon and write a new memoir detailing his marathon journey to inspire others to tackle seemingly impossible challenges.