Paralympian recalls finding his path
Rob Jones needed a direction so he left college and joined the Marine Corps in 2006.
“I was lonely. I was isolated, directionless,” he said during the opening of The American Legion 103rd National Convention in Milwaukee. “I had no path to my life.”
It was while laying in sand with bug bites in Afghanistan that he felt fulfilled and happy. “I found courage while going to war and I was living a life of selflessness by taking on one of the most dangerous jobs in the war on terror: finding IEDs. I finally had a path for my life.”
One single step altered that path.
During his second tour in 2010, he stepped on an IED, which resulted in above knee amputations of both legs. He feared that his courage and selflessness were gone and that he was now “physically broken.”
“My path was gone and in an instant, I was forced to start all over again.”
However, Jones, a member of American Legion Post 295 in Middleburg, Va., embraced fitness as a tool in his recovery. His ensuing 18-month-old rehabilitation stay at Walter Reed started with learning how to walk again, then ride a bike and eventually run. In 2012, he won a medal in rowing at the Paralympics. But Jones did not see rowing as the path that would bring him what he needed.
In 2013, he rode his bicycle 5,100 miles across the United States in 181 days. Still, he hadn’t found his path. He set out to compete in the 2016 Paralympics in the triathlon. But that ended in “absolute failure. I didn’t even come remotely close to even winning a race much less making it to the Paralympics.”
On the bright side, he found a joy in running during the triathlon training. Then he had an epiphany. His new goal was to run 31 marathons in 31 days in 31 different cities.
He trained hard for 18 months. Running. Training. Planning. He had found his path. On Oct. 11, 2017, the day before the first marathon, he explained his motivation.
“That terrorist who put the landmine in the ground that severed my legs wants me to be too scared to try. It’s his goal. It wasn’t just to kill me on the battlefield. It was to kill my spirit when I got back home. He wanted to see my fellow Marines’ spirits get crushed. He wanted to see all my fellow Americans’ spirits get crushed. He failed to kill me on the battlefield. But every single day that goes by, he has the chance to kill my spirit. The only way I know that I can continue to win is to go out there tomorrow and run a marathon.”
Jones finished that first marathon and completed one each of the next 30 days to reach his goal. Today, he continues to inspire and act like a Marine.
“Along with the title of Marine, comes the responsibility of the title: to never stop fighting for your country and your fellow veterans and fellow Marines,” he said. “When I stepped on that IED, I wasn’t able to do that in the way I originally intended by going into direct combat against America’s enemies. But the circumstances that were created by that IED that made me unsuited for combat made me perfectly suited for the fight that happens back home.”
Jones, once again, has his path laid out before him.
“The fight doesn’t end on the battlefield,” he said. “There is a whole new fight back home that we all have to fight for each other. That’s why The American Legion exists. Everybody in this room has that attitude, that mentality, that we are not going to be done serving until six fellow servicemembers lower us into the ground in a pinewood box.”
Jones was among the special guests during the special American Legion Tango Alpha Lima podcast series dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. (Listen or watch his episode here.)