A little over a year after Laura Schwanger first got into a scull to row for a place on the US national team, she earned a prime spot on the US Paralympic rowing team during the US National Rowing Championships, Sunday, June 29, 2008, at Lake Mercer County Park outside of Princeton, New Jersey.

This year marks the sport’s Paralympian debut in Beijing this month. It won’t be the first time the 49-year-old resident of Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, has been to the Games, however.

Schwanger is a three-time Paralympic track and field athlete, winner of multiple golds, silver and bronze medals at Seoul in 1988, Barcelona in 1992, and Atlanta in 1996. She thought she had retired from Paralympic athletics after Atlanta. She was wrong.

In March 2006, Schwanger was diagnosed with breast cancer. She quit her full-time job as administrator of United Spinal’s Philadelphia office to undergo radiation and chemotherapy, which she described as “severe and devastating….It left me with no strength, no endurance, no nothing,” she said. (Schwanger remains on United Spinal’s Board of Directors.)

After completing her treatments that October, Schwanger was looking for a way to build up her strength and stamina. She decided to give indoor rowing on an ergometer a shot.

Even before Schwanger’s diagnosis, Karen Lewis of the Philadelphia Rowing Program for the Disabled (PRPD), the oldest adaptive rowing program in the country, had been trying to get her interested in the sport. In 2005, adaptive rowing became the newest sport added to the Paralympic roster, and Lewis was named head coach of the National Team.

By February 2007, Schwanger was working out with the same regimen the PRPD team uses. Two months later, in her first tryout on a river, she was classified as an arms-only single-scull rower. (Adaptive rowing has two other classes: double scull, which requires two rowers able to use their trunks and/or arms, and coxed four, which requires four rowers who can use a combination of arms, trunk, and legs. At the Paralympics, Schwanger will be the sole US woman to row for a medal in her class and Ron Harvey of San Diego will row for the US in the men’s class; the remaining crews are co-ed).

“I liked what rowing did to my body,” Schwanger says. “I feel like I’m in the best physical shape I’ve ever been in.”

Schwanger—and all competitors in Shanghai—will be using an adapted scull called the Windtek Explorer. “Everyone will be in the same boat,” she said.

The Paralympics will run from September 6 through 17. About 4,000 athletes from 145 countries are expected to participate.