Athletes drawn to the healing waters

The sport of adaptive rowing, which made its Paralympic debut three years ago in Beijing with both Harvey and Schwanger competing for the United States team, offers three competitive categories for athletes who can use their legs, trunk, and arms (including visual and intellectual impairments), trunk and arms only, or arms and shoulders.

What all of the participants have in common is the ability to accept their physical limitations and find ways around them. “Adaptive sports helped me to get out of bed in the morning,’’ said the 52-year-old Schwanger, a resident of Harrisburg, Pa., who transformed herself from a world-class track and field athlete into a world-class sculler.

Schwanger, who played “a little bit of everything’’ in high school, developed MS in 1981 when she was in the Army, but within a few years had become a top-level competitor in the discus, shot put, and javelin, winning 11 medals at three Paralympics before retiring in 1996.

What brought her back a decade later was her bout with cancer, which blindsided her. “I was just totally in shock because our family doesn’t have cancer, as far as I know,’’ Schwanger said. “We have bad hearts.’’

After chemotherapy and radiation, she was looking for an activity that might enhance her recovery and chose rowing. A year later, Schwanger won the national title in the adaptive singles and went on to finish sixth at the world championships. The following summer, she won the Paralympic bronze medal. “The last one means as much as the first and probably more,’’ Schwanger said, “because of what I had just gone through.’’

Harvey, meanwhile, always had been an oarsman, rowing with MIT’s lightweight varsity in the early ’90s and competing in the Head. In 2000, he and partner Dan Dougherty competed in the Olympic trials in the lightweight doubles. A year later, out for a routine bike ride, he lost control after skidding on gravel at the bottom of a hill, was thrown against a signpost, and fractured his spine.