Warren Macdonald Lost his Legs but he Climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro Anyway!

Rock climbing is his fascination. It’s been the place where he’s found his greatest wins and his greatest losses. It’s his place of connection, his place of peace, his church and his life’s adventure. It’s also the place he lost his legs and re-invented himself in a whole world of new possibilities. Warren Macdonald has overcome the challenges of life like no other. Who knew that his true passion would lead to so much pain and yet the pain of that passion became the purpose of his future.

“When I was 18 I did an outward bound course that took us outside of our comfort zone by leaving us in the back country to fend for ourselves for four days — I hated it”, Warren recalls. “On that course I got my a** handed to me on a plate. It was too hard and I couldn’t do it. That challenge was an eye-opener because after it was over I realized that I can’t ever be in that position again. That’s when I went on a 12 month mission to transform my health, body and mind. One year later, I took that mountain like it was a piece of cake. That’s when I fell in love with the challenges of climbing, the outdoors and nature. I realized that it was my sanctuary.”

Growing up in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, Warren had a lingering feeling that never left him. “There’s got to be more to life than this”. Exploring the outdoors, climbing mountains and being in peak physical shape gave him glimpses of a feeling of deep connection – the place where he felt most alive and connected to something bigger than himself. He spent decades chasing that feeling of connection through climbing and looking for the next high.

In April 1997, things came undone in a big way. Warren heard about the Island called Hinchinbrook in North Queensland and he set out for a four-day adventure. Warren recalls, “I wanted to swim every day and I was on the beach on this island and life was great. I got talking to a Dutch guy named Geert van Keulen, and he said he wanted to climb to the top of the mountain on this island. I wasn’t going to do it alone because it looked really difficult but I would do it with Geert. I felt really lucky to bump into a climbing partner.”

Warren and Geert headed out to climb at first light the next morning. Warren was excited about the adventure that the climb was going to bring. Warren recalls, “That Mountain was very challenging and a lot harder than we thought. We didn’t make it to the top so we stopped to camp for the night. We cooked dinner and got ready for bed. I needed to take a leak, and it looked like my best option was to cross a small creek, a trickle really, to a rock wall on the other side. It was 12 or 14 feet high and looked like an easy scramble up and over to where I’d be far enough from the creek, our water source. I found a crack, reached up, got my right foot up on the wall and as I pulled up, the world underneath me gave way. Just like that I was slammed back down into the creek bed, beneath what turned out to be a one tonne slab of rock.”

The next hour seemed like forever to Warren, “For a few seconds I didn’t know what was happening and the weight on me was so heavy I couldn’t believe the pain. I tried everything to push it off. I have never experienced that kind of pain and I had to do something to make it stop. I screamed out and Geert came running over to find me pinned under the rock from the waist down. We both tried to move the rock but couldn’t. We needed a lever or some other way of getting the rock off me. Geert tried to get a number of levers and rocks to move it but nothing was working. Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, we felt the drops of rain come and then we had torrential rain and I had water around me, I thought, holy s**t, I’m done, this water is going over my head and there’s nothing we can do”. Geert tried building a dam which didn’t work. We were looking for a snorkel or some other device that would help me to breathe if I ended up under water. Miraculously, after some time the tropical down pour subsided and the water started to drain back down.”

Warren and Geert realized that nothing they did was going to work and they had to go get help. Warren watched Geert turn around and hike down the mountain. He said, “I never felt so alone. I knew that I was starring down the barrel of my ultimate test and I would be there another 24 hours or more before help came. I tried to calm myself and think about surviving. In total, I spent 45 hours under that rock and to this day my favourite sound is hearing a helicopter come over the horizon. I’ve never been so happy to see another human being.”

Once they got Warren to the hospital they started running tests and assessing the damage. A doctor came in and said, “You do realize your legs have been severely damaged. I hate to tell you this but, we are going to have to amputate them.” Warren recalls, “It had crossed my mind that I might lose a foot but I never thought I might lose both legs above my knees. I cried myself to sleep that night. The next day after the operation I woke up into a whole new world.”

Warren explains, “I woke up in the hospital minus both my legs and felt like I got hit by a truck. I was in intensive care for about 10 days. Nobody knew if I was going to make it or not. That was step one, I had to survive. Step two became a process of healing and I healed. Step three, I had to learn how to go through this journey in a wheelchair. That was challenging. In those early days, every time I went to do something there was a new obstacle. One obstacle after another, I had to learn new ways of getting there. So life became about overcoming every challenge. I learned so much. I realized that every time I put an obstacle behind me, it makes me stronger for the next one.”

This is where things got interesting and the point where Warren’s life took a turn into the miraculous. One might say, the epiphany point where he realized that everything happens for a reason.

It was in this phase of Warren’s recovery that everything inside him changed. Warren’s resilient spirit kicked in, “That’s when I started looking for the obstacles as a way to get stronger and be stronger. Once I took life on at that level everything shifted. I got the crazy idea that I’m an outdoor guy and I have to be out there even without my legs. I went out into the wilderness and I excelled at that. That’s when it hit me, I wonder…can a guy with no legs climb a mountain?”

That was my quest Warren declared, “I have to see if I can climb Cradle Mountain, and I travelled to Tasmania to see if it was possible. That was a life defining moment for me. I found that it was absolutely possible. I had the biggest feeling of a sense of connection I ever had in all my climbing days. I did it! This blew the lid off what it meant to be without legs and what was possible. I wondered what I could do next, something bigger! So I chose Federation Peak which makes Cradle Mountain look like a walk in the park. And from Federation Peak I went on to plan my dream of climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, without my legs.”

In 2003 Warren and a team climbed Kilimanjaro. Warren shares his insights, “The funny thing that happened after that climb, was that I got to the point where I realized … it’s not about the mountain, it’s about how we challenge ourselves and what we can create from there. This was the understanding that was trying to come in. This is what I was meant to learn. There’s lots of ways to feel a connection in life but it’s not outside of us. It was never about the mountain it was always about a sense of connection inside me. We can find it outside and I enjoy doing that but the bigger part of what it’s about, it’s that feeling inside of us and at any time, we can choose to access it.”

Leadership is about overcoming challenges with determination and creativity. It’s about rising to the task and finding solutions. The underlying foundation of that is our perceptions and how we see those challenges. Perceptions will either stop us and keep us a victim of life or will they rise us up, and be the reason for the next big game we play. Perception is always based on “how we see things” and it sets the foundation for what we do and how we take action. In essence, how we see the world directly correlates to how we take life on. If we see a situation as a disaster, that’s what we get.

Warren’s wisdom is summed up like this, “Resilience is something that we need to practice, because when we find ourselves in a situation where we need resilience it’s probably too late. We need to put resilience in the bank; the reason I survived had everything to do with having spent most of my life expanding my comfort zone, and being healthy and challenging myself physically. So when it came time for that ultimate test I had banked that resilience. Be in the habit of investing in your resilience bank account.”

Warren’s message of resilience applies to business overall and it is a really good way to think about the challenges that the energy industry faces with the price of oil today. Our perceptions will create our reality. Do we want to focus on demise or do we want to focus on what’s possible? Now is the time to call on our resilience of the past. How we have overcome our challenges and how we create new opportunities is key. Resilience is a daily practice of sharpening our pencils, embracing technology, finding new solutions, and forging ahead in a new global economy. An economy that will ultimately lead us into a new energy-sustainable future.

Warren Macdonald works with innovative, forward thinking organizations and associations looking to foster “out of the box” thinking; the kind of thinking that empowers potential and inspires you to find opportunity in change. To book Warren as an inspirational speaker at your event visit www.warren-macdonald.com.