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The Review April 5, 2016
Knee-deep in determination A Dixon Woman did more than just talk the talk, she walked the walk – walker, pain and all BY CHRISTOPHER HEIMERMAN
DIXON – A year removed from a terrifying fall, with a knee that makes more noise than some 1985 Yugos, 67-year-old Lynda Norton did something she’d never done before: run a 5K – with a walker. “I’d never [even] run a 1K,” she said. Her daughter, Dawn Lopez, was in town a couple of weeks ago and signed up online for the Dixon Family YMCA’s Shamrock Shuffle on March 12. Intent on surprising Lopez, Norton contacted the Y the Tuesday before to ask about the price and the terrain, then took the $25 plunge herself. The next night, she drove along the out-and-back course to scout it out. Her knees killing her – as tends to be the case as the weather changes – she was still having second thoughts that Saturday morning. She let Lopez fetch her packet to save a few steps, parked in the Y’s lot to save a few more, and even though walkers are encouraged to start toward the back of the pack, on her daughter’s advice she sauntered to the front to save yet a few more. Then, armed with the mantra, “If God brings you to it, he’s going to get you through it,” and with wounded local veterans such as Adam Devine, Michael Shoemaker, Matt
Beard and her ex-husband, Clarence Eugene Norton, all on her mind, she set forth. “If they can do it, that shows us we have to do something,” Norton said “If you don’t get moving, if you give up, it’s never going to happen.”
A crushing break On Dec. 12, 2014, Norton fell on the deck at her boyfriend’s house as she went out to fetch the Telegraph. “It’s the Telegraph’s fault,” joked Gary DeBord, her partner and buddy, as she calls him. What played out was no joke. It had been about 18 years since she’d had her cartilage-devoid knees replaced with artificial ones. Her right knee had been buckling of late, and that morning, she slipped on black ice, broke her femur and crushed her knee. Paramedics radioed for help, knowing the break was so close to the artery that if not properly handled, the aftermath of the fall could be fatal. “They literally carried my leg behind me,” Norton said. She was sent to Rockford, where she underwent two major surgeries. A hinge was installed in her right knee – a knee that creaks and cracks and crunches without explanation. She spent nearly a year in a nursing home in Sterling, where insurance issues put responsibility for her bills in question and ruled out physical therapy. She gave the professionals their due, not putting weight on the knee for 16 weeks. Just getting out of bed was a battle, but she
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conducted her own therapy, recalling her method after the replacement surgeries in the mid-’90s. “I would push, and my mind would tell my body to do it, but the body said, ‘No,’” Norton said. “I kept pushing and pushing until I got where I could move it.” As the ongoing legal battle waged on and the day she’d be unable to afford more care approached, she reminded herself of one thing: “If I’m going to come home, I’ve got to be walking.”
‘I’ll be right behind you, all the way’ Whether she realized it at the time, when Norton turned to tell the race’s near-idling motorcycle rider that he could pass her at any time, his response nicely summed up how her first 5K would play out. “He said, ‘I’ll be right behind you all the way,’” Norton said. “I warned him it might be a long day.” Runners, friends and strangers alike, who’d halfcircled the turnaround point, stopped on their way back to offer encouragement. Rachel Cocar, a pastor at First Baptist Church in Dixon, stopped on her way back to pray with Norton, about the time Lopez walked back and caught up with her mom to walk the
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Accompanied by Shamrock Shuffle volunteers and Michelle McCue-Magik, 49, of Sterling, Lynda Norton walks the homestretch leading to Old Settler’s Cabin along the Dixon riverfront. obliged, “as tears were rolling down my face, because my legs were killing me.” As she approached a drove of folks offering encouragement, many of them crying, she was accompanied by her best friend, Maureen “Nickie” Voss. “She’s gone through a lot, and she’s one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met,” Voss said. “She’s such an inspiration. I’ve always admired her so much. She’s got a lot of spunk in her.” Christine Hoyle is the YMCA’s sports and wellness director. She had heard someone was pushing a stroller, but when she learned it was actually a walker, she put a seal on the waterworks. “I was welling up, but
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they were tears of joy and. I hope when I’m in my late 60s, I can do that too – something that a lot of people wouldn’t dare try,” Hoyle said. “She truly won in her own right. She probably worked harder than some of the kids who ran the 5-minute miles at the front.” The race kicked off the Y’s Strong Kids, Strong Communities campaign, which hit its fundraising goal last year, and aims for $92,000 this year. Proceeds fund youth and senior programs. To think, Norton’s journey began with a commitment to walking again and, even more importantly? “I wanna get back to my line-dancing!” Norton yelled.
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rest of the way back. She got offered a car ride at several junctures. “But every time I got to where it was a lot, and I was thinking, ‘Am I going to be able to do this?’ I went right back to the song I’d sing at the nursing home when I’d get disgusted: ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’” Norton said. “I kept saying, ‘He’s going to get you through it. Just keep walking. Look at Adam Devine. Look at this guy. Look at that one. They don’t have legs, and they got through it.’ “I told my daughter what I was singing, and she said, ‘Are you nuts? You should’ve been singing ‘Crazy,’ for signing up.’” They came by a portapotty, but Norton was too weak to access it. “I could just see myself falling headfirst into a toilet,” Norton said. “I started laughing, and I said to my daughter, ‘They need a handicap porta-potty.’ She said, ‘On a racetrack?’” The volunteer trailing her, one of several who provided a convoy to the finish line, said he’d relay the memo. Those volunteers urged her to give her best elbowelbow-wrist-wrist, royal wave as she approached the finish line. Not quite 90 minutes after leaving the starting line, she saw it once again, and she
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