026: Kyle Maynard: 2004 SP Best Athlete Award for Disability, On Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and Living Life With No Excuses

Being born with no arms and legs never stopped Kyle Maynard from becoming a competitive football player, a champion wrestler and a summiteer of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Join Kyle’s journey as he almost gave up half way, but thanks to his family, coaches and mentors, kept living his life with no excuses. Never stop thinking forward on what can be possible and what you can achieve through hard work and positivity.
It’s Mark Pattison back again with another phenomenal episode of Finding Your Summit, and I don’t throw that word around a lot but this individual is special. His name is Kyle Maynard. I was on Aconcagua down in Argentina climbing this crazy mountain, about 21,000 feet, and all of the sudden I see this guy crawling up the mountain and I didn’t know what was going at me. I'm sitting on a rock, taking a breather like, “Can I keep going?” He literally crawls next to me. This guy, Kyle, was born with no arms or legs, congenital amputee it’s called. Essentially at the elbow and at the kneecap, that’s where it ends. He is taking on these amazing challenges. He has been Oprah. He’s got two ESPYs for Athlete of the Year. He climbed Kilimanjaro. Talk about absolute inspiration.
We walked through this journey and he has got this whole mantra on life about no excuses; no excuses to go do things. If we all took that to heart, we’d just be better people. We wouldn’t sit around complaining. Look at the guy next to you, just an inspiration. I told him this as I was looking up his resume and I was doing some research on him, I was like, “I haven’t done anything compared to what this guy has done.”
He is just constantly forward thinking about possibilities and that’s the thing that inspires me and why this episode was so much fun to do. Phenomenal it is, phenomenal describes him. As always, please go in and rate and review on iTunes, Finding Your Summit. Just continued to pile up the downloads. People are so driven to hear about adversity because we all have it. There's nothing special I'm doing, it’s just the people are coming on and sharing their stories and we can all identify with these different things. On that note, let’s get after this episode and have a chat with Kyle.


Resources Mentioned in this Episode:Kyle Maynard


Kyle Maynard guesting in Oprah

ESPN

Waterboys

Kirstie Ennis

No Excuses

Kyle’s Facebook

Kyle’s Instagram