Can an Aspie be athletic??

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Murphy, 22, a senior from Warsaw, is the best distance runner in the 48-year history of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Later this month, he could become the Jaguars’ first qualifier for the NCAA Track and Field Championships. Four years after leaving high school, he is graduating from college with a media arts degree.

His mother, Lynn, said he does not want to be known as “the autistic runner,” and he does not consider himself to have a disability.

“Not necessarily, no,” Murphy said. “I don’t really think about it all the time.”

Murphy, at age 2, would not speak. The family lived in Kenosha, Wis., near the Illinois border. When he was 3, the school system agreed to evaluate him. He was untestable.

“He couldn’t answer anything,” Lynn Murphy said. “They couldn’t engage him in anything.”

Murphy’s parents, Jeff and Lynn, initially tried to get Robert to state his name.

“What’s your name?” the mother asked.

“What’s your name?” Robert would reply.

IUPUI’s Chuck Koeppen, 71, has seen nearly everything as a coach. He won a record 23 state titles in 37 years at Carmel High School.

But he had never seen a runner like Murphy, whose occasional “meltdowns” have required understanding. At one indoor meet, the runner became so upset after a race that when he finally laid down on the track, his mother literally sat on her son to calm him.

Murphy’s socialization and sense of humor were enhanced by watching “The Simpsons,” according to his mother. He knows the series so well that he can cite season and episode number.

Koeppen uses adjectives such as mind-boggling, amazing and “dy-no-mite” to describe the runner, calling him coachable and competitive.

“I couldn’t ask for a finer person to work with and run for me than Robert,” Koeppen said.

Last month, Murphy won the Mel Garland Distinguished Student-Athlete Award, the highest honor given by the university to an athlete.

Other Jaguar runners can endorse that selection. Murphy is so dominant, even in practice, that he starts behind the others in workouts so he can push himself harder.

“I don’t know anyone as tough as him, to be honest with you,” teammate Dakota Dubbs said.

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Murphy, at age 2, would not speak. The family lived in Kenosha, Wis., near the Illinois border. When he was 3, the school system agreed to evaluate him. He was untestable.

“He couldn’t answer anything,” Lynn Murphy said. “They couldn’t engage him in anything.”

As important as Murphy’s running were the friendships created on a tight-knit squad. Teammates liked him enough to tease him, setting off his car alarm when they practiced at Grace College. Another time, a teammate took Murphy’s keys, started the car and slumped down, making it appear no one was driving. Murphy chased the runaway vehicle through a parking lot.

Murphy had an offbeat sense of humor, so he fit it in with the team. He sent an email to his coach with a subject line of: Warsaw runner badly injured, out for the rest of the year. Mills clicked on a link to a video in which it appeared Poyner was blown up by a bomb in the Grace parking lot.

Teammates can be flustered by public meltdowns, mostly because other runners might dismiss Murphy as a jerk. To the Jaguars, he is a beloved teammate. It is not as if the IUPUI runners can locate everyone to explain. Breedlove said that it is frustrating to watch witnesses sit in judgment.

As for Murphy, he said that he “might be a little different personality-wise,” but that he has rapport with his teammates and coaches. He has never had a bad coach, he said.

“Autism in general is just lack of communication,” he said. “That’s why I was more of an introvert growing up. I always felt like I was enough of a normal person.”

It's entirely plausible to be athletic and on the spectrum, to do it professionally as with most other career goals will take strong dedication though, so the heart must be in it. Though no athlete myself, I run 6 days a week and enjoy challenging my physical performance over time. Exercise has always been my ultimate answer to the problem of my depression, too. Running is the only weapon in my menagerie providing a powerful antidepressant effect guaranteed not to slowly deplete over time, as it was with all past medications.

Tommy Des Brisay had an insatiable need to move when he was a child.

He began walking at 8 months old. He would bounce on his backyard trampoline for hours and climb heights fearlessly. He slept only three hours a night until he was 7. As he grew older, he would go on long tandem bike rides, cross-country ski, and lead his father on walks that would leave them stranded miles from their home in Ottawa, Ontario.

And when he was stressed or upset, Des Brisay—who was diagnosed with autism when he was 2 and a half—would run. This posed a danger, because he didn’t understand what could harm him: traffic, exposure to weather, strangers.

“He’s quick, so the people around him are pretty serious guys,” said Peter Des Brisay. “They’ve got stressed looks on their faces and they’re breathing hard, and Tommy will be running by, giggling, singing a jingle from a Disney movie. They kind of look at him like, ‘What the hell? Why aren’t you dying like the rest of us?’”

What is the connection between autism and running? Scientists are beginning to explore what makes the sport such a potent tool for someone like Tommy Des Brisay.

Autism is considered a spectrum disorder because of the wide range of symptoms and behaviors—and significant individual variation—that go along with it. But the primary characteristics of the condition that would lead to an autism diagnosis are deficits in social communication and social interaction, along with restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities.

The Des Brisay family has seen that the more Tommy runs, the less anxious he seems to be. More important, running has increased his social circle, giving him opportunities to practice his language and communication skills. And over the 10 years that he’s been a runner, he’s become less reliant on medication and has experienced fewer meltdowns.

“There aren’t many places where he can be just one of the guys. Not one of the autistic guys or even a different guy. Just a guy doing a great workout.”
PETER DES BRISAY

Des Brisay didn’t begin to speak single words until he was almost 7, but his verbal abilities grew dramatically through his teens. “I have no idea if running was the catalyst, but teachers in his classroom would say things to us like, ‘We’ve never seen a student make so many gains in language throughout the teen years,’” Given Des Brisay said.

Of course, it’s impossible to know how Des Brisay would have developed without running—perhaps he would have made those same gains. But his mother says the biggest changes she has noticed in her son were his increased self-confidence and improved sense of well-being. “He became so aware of what was going on around him,” Given Des Brisay said. “At a road race, he would actually want to participate.”

Research is beginning to confirm some of the things the family has noticed. At the Academy of Pediatric Physical Therapy’s Section on Pediatrics 2016 Annual Conference last November, researchers from Achilles International and New York Medical College presented the promising results from one of the largest studies on autism and running to date.

Their work looked at the qualitative and quantitative effects of the Achilles Kids running program on 94 students with autism over a four-month period. They saw statistically significant improvements in endurance, social awareness, cognition, communication, and motivation, and fewer restrictive and repetitive behaviors among those who ran and walked for 20 minutes twice per week.

“[The results are] consistent with anecdotal evidence,” said Stuart Lustig, M.D., lead medical director for child and adolescent care at Cigna Behavioral Health in Glendale, California. “It’s certainly hopeful, but not definitive at this point. We need further studies.”

Previous studies of individuals with autism have suggested that exercise can improve some of those same measures.

The research shows what exercise also reduces: aggression, self injury, and motor stereotypies, which describes the repetitive behaviors—body rocking and hand flapping—that some people with autism engage in.

While many forms of exercise can benefit people on the spectrum, running may offer unique advantages. And some athletes with autism are seeing the benefits first hand.

Despite the benefits of exercise, few people with autism are prescribed exercise as a form of therapy.

Instead, plans cover things like occupational therapy, speech therapy, physical therapy, applied behavior analysis, and social skills groups, for starters. These therapies often take hours every day.

Russell Lang, Ph.D., the executive director of the Clinic for Autism Research, Evaluation and Support at Texas State University in San Marcos, said that when a person has a serious condition, the habit is to think that it requires a complex intervention.

Exercise might seem trivial.

“You’re thinking to yourself, ‘I could do an hour of this treatment or an hour of running,’” Lang said. “We don’t necessarily know which one of those things would be better for any individual to do within that hour, but the tendency may be to think that the other form of intervention is of course better, because exercise is just exercise.”

“I would hazard a guess that his running is the best medication of all.”

As more people are being diagnosed with autism—1 out of every 68 children in the U.S.—more programming has emerged.

On middle school and high school cross-country and track-and-field teams, many children with autism find opportunities to compete. Their success stories regularly make headlines.

For some children with autism who are in separate special education classrooms at school, joining their school’s cross-country team may be the first time they participate in a mainstream activity, opening up a “world of opportunity for them to be included,” said Randy Horowitz, a special educator and school administrator in Levittown, New York, who has worked extensively with people with autism.

Others are stand-alone programs. The Long Island, New York–based Rolling Thunder Special Needs Program is a trailblazer. The club began in 1998, and it has produced a number of success stories, including Mikey Brannigan and Alex and Jamie Schneider.

Rolling Thunder was founded by Steve Cuomo, an outspoken parent of a now-adult son, Steven Cuomo, with autism and cerebral palsy. While the group is not specifically for people with autism, it attracts many people on the spectrum. And Cuomo finds a place for everyone who shows up.

“[Track-and-field] is the perfect sport,” Cuomo said. “If you’re big, small, tall, little, fat, skinny, there’s something for you. I can throw, I can run, I can jump.”

While Brannigan’s success has brought a lot of attention to Rolling Thunder, Cuomo stresses that the program is just as much for the beginners walking to lose weight as it is about those looking to set records and win races.

“This is about breaking the stigma, and giving these kids the tools to succeed in life,” Cuomo said.

Each weekend in New York City’s Central Park, the group Achilles International offers the Achilles Kids Central Park training program, a free training session for children with disabilities. Like Rolling Thunder, the program is not designed specifically for people with autism. But the majority of children it attracts are on the autism spectrum.

“It’s an interesting commentary about where the world of disability is right now, that this is the population that needs serving,” said Megan Wynne Lombardo, the director of the program.

For some, it’s also one of the first extracurricular activities where they receive positive feedback. She recalls one boy who showed natural running talent, and she told his parents so.

“His parents kept saying to me, ‘He’s really good at this?’ Because they get so much negative feedback, these kids, about everything they do, and so do their parents. It’s like, ‘They did this wrong,’ ‘They can’t sit,’” Wynne Lombardo said. “This is something they can do, they’re good at. It’s a really supportive environment and it’s a place where you can put forth some effort, see the results, and feel good about yourself.”

In Staten Island, New York Road Runners has offered autism-friendly runs, without large crowds or a starting gun, as part of its NYRR Open Runs. Many people with autism also have sensory sensitivities that can make crowds and loud noises overwhelming.

Similar programs have come up in Georgia, where Aleta Mills-Stubin developed Running Mates, which combines social skills and running. In Connecticut, Running on the Spectrum is a running group specifically for children and teens with autism. In Massachusetts, Team Verge, an inclusive running and wheelchair program for all ages, doesn’t seek out people on the autism spectrum. But organizers say about 90 percent of the people the program attracts have autism.

Yeah, when i feel crappy i have a work out feel bit better. Likewise when slacking off i start to feel like junk again.

I'm wondering if it's possible for an athletic Aspie to exist - bucking the cultural stereotype. Not that they'd be Olympians or major league sports hot-shots, but higher-than-average athletic.

While I'm in good shape from weightlifting, biking, swimming, etc over many years and hardly look scrawny or chubby, I'm still not really athletic.

I have heard isolated stories here and there about people with AS being athletic: there's Clay Marzo the surfer, there was a young Canadian man called Jordan Morrison with Aspergers, who was described by his friends as being "very athletic" and a "talented skateboarder". Sadly, Jordan was tragically murdered while on a trip in the Dominican Republic, but appeared to be unrelated to his having Aspergers - rather he intervened when a young woman was being harassed, and got beaten to death (Google "Jordan Morrison Aspergers" and you'll see.) Another example was a young man with Aspergers who ran the marathon every year in his city (but I don't recall the article saying how well he placed, other than the fact that he finished).

I suppose there are always exceptions, just like Jewish and East Indian people are not typically thought of as "athletic types", there are some out there for sure. But like Aspies, they're probably a much lower percentage as compared to the proportion of NTs who are athletic and don't fall into said ethnic categories.

I got a gold and a bronze in advanced level alpine skiing.

Can an Aspie be athletic??

I have had it my whole life - my Asperger's and ADHD. I am who I am because of it. I would not have been the person nor ice hockey player that I am if I didn't have this...

(CNN)Brittany Tagliareni is not your typical tennis player. Before a match, she needs help tying her shoes and putting her hair in a ponytail.

But none of that matters once she steps on the court.
The sport has opened up a whole new world for the 26-year-old athlete with autism.
"People accept me for who I am, and what I can do," she told CNN.
Her favorite part?
"I like ... beating the men," she said with a laugh.

Brittany also was diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder and motor-control issues caused by apraxia and dyspraxia.
She didn't say her first word until she was 6.
But it took three more years for her parents to get a more definitive diagnosis.
"It wasn't until she was 9 that we heard the word 'autism,'" her mom recalled. "It was one of those things, 'Well, now what do I do?'... But it was the same girl, the same therapies."