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The adaptive athlete is changing who gets to be a trail runner.
At the top of Montana’s Big Sky Ski Resort sits 11,166-foot Lone Peak, the crux of the infamous trail race known as the Rut. The scree-filled approach is aptly named Bone Crusher, an unnervingly exposed ridgeline that gains 2,000-plus feet in less than three miles. For Vasu Sojitra, it was just another beautiful day outside. After cramming 50 miles into his only week of dedicated training for the 28K course, this North Face-sponsored multisport athlete tapered for just five days before devouring the Bone Crusher and crossing the finish line last year, sweaty RockTape-covered hands clutching his crutches after seven and a half hours.
“It wasn’t a full off-the-couch effort, but I highly don’t recommend it,” the 30-year-old Bozeman resident says, laughing. “But my ‘off the couch’ may be a different level than other people’s ‘off the couch.’”
There’s not a lot about Sojitra that is on the same level as others. While most Rut racers were cautiously picking their way down the exposed talus fields on the descent from Lone Peak, Sojitra scampered from flat rock to flat rock, balancing his crutches and cruising past runners who watched in disbelief as the athlete flew downhill on his one leg. “I told people that you just have to move faster than the rocks that are going to hit your ankles,” he says, joking but not joking.
It’s not surprising that Sojitra was offering advice to others while stubbornly tackling a race course that many—including himself—previously thought would be too difficult for him. As the first adaptive endurance athlete on The North Face’s sponsorship roster, Sojitra is using that good humor and singular determination to change the narrative around who belongs in trail running and the broader world of mountain sports.
Born in Connecticut to parents who had emigrated from India, Sojitra contracted a blood infection called septicemia when he was nine months old. Doctors believed it would spread, so they amputated his right leg just below the hip. After nearly six months, the hospital released him, and his parents opted to return to India for more family support. He spent five years in Gujarat, a state on the western coast of the country, trailing his older brother and forever breaking or outgrowing his prosthetic limb. Eventually, when Sojitra was 7 years old, his family relocated back to Connecticut, where his parents had access to better medical equipment for their son.
It was there, playing with the kids around his apartment building, that he began noticing people with skin like his own in a state that was then almost 80 percent white. More importantly, he saw himself in their outdoor activities and experiences. As he grew older, Sojitra became more aware of representation within his communities, and says he connected with the 1999 Disney Channel movie Johnny Tsunami, about a Hawaiian surfer whose family relocates to Vermont. “I felt validated,” Sojitra says of seeing the character’s experience adapting to New England culture.
Sojitra plunged into sports as a child, beginning with soccer in India and adding skateboarding and skiing after returning to the U.S. When he was about 9, he grew tired of his cumbersome prosthetic leg and trained himself to use forearm crutches with open cuffs to grip his arms. While more strenuous on the upper body, forearm crutches offer more control than underarm crutches and make traveling on uneven terrain easier for athletes. Sojitra now credits both his stubbornness and his early adoption of forearm crutches for allowing him to undertake his current adventures. “It’s like I have old-man muscles now,” he says. “You know how your dad is so ridiculously strong without ever working out and you’re like, ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ My muscles are like that. I’ve been doing this for so long that it’s just really ingrained into my body.”
Sojitra was so passionate about sports that his love of skiing took him to Vermont—just like Johnny Tsunami—where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Vermont. Later, that same love of skiing moved him west to Bozeman, Montana, where he joined a local soccer league. One day after practice in spring 2018, a friend invited him on a trail. “It was a three-mile run, and it kicked my ass,” Sojitra says. But in moving quickly on his crutches and jogging with his leg, Sojitra felt the glimmer of a runner’s high. He started hitting the trails more often and challenging himself to go farther.
He built up his mileage over that summer, topping out at 30-mile days. “That was definitely a steep learning curve,” he says, noting that his hands were always blistered, raw, and covered in hot spots. Because athletes with disabilities have so few resources to navigate unorthodox mountain travel, Sojitra put his engineering degree to work and fashioned his own equipment. Dubbed “Vasu’s Hand Shoes,” he created a hand-wrapping technique using a combination of DonJoy padded tape and RockTape kinesiology wrap. The system reduces friction and minimizes the pressure points that crop up on his hands after hours of crutching.
As much as Sojitra enjoys running just for the sake of running, he also runs in order to build fitness for his other mountain endeavors. In June 2021, two months prior to the Rut, he and fellow adaptive athlete Pete McAfee made the first disabled ski descent of 20,310-foot Denali, the highest peak in North America. Long runs with friends along Montana’s Gallatin Crest Trail and loops through the state’s Crazy Mountains were key elements of Sojitra’s Denali preparation.
Sojitra wants his achievements on the trail to help dismantle the many barriers faced by other disabled folks. He understands that most people are excited to see him out there, but their enthusiasm puts it into perspective: He is unique because there isn’t enough disabled representation.
“I still dreaded going through the finish line and hearing all the ‘Good for you!’ and ‘Yeah, buddy!’ and all the other condescending things people say,” Sojitra says. “It’s bittersweet. If you’re really inspired by me, then show it by tearing down barriers so I’m not the only disabled person of color taking part in races like this.” That way, he says, we can normalize disability and not make people with disabilities feel different from others or exceptional.
Sojitra believes that the obstacles preventing participation are not the disabilities themselves; instead, the biggest hurdles are the ones unknowingly put in place by nondisabled folks, such as exorbitant race fees. Statistically, disabled people are more likely to be affected by unemployment and low wages due to limited access to health care and medical equipment, so accommodations such as sliding-scale registration fees can help. Sojitra says race directors should make a better effort to establish this relationship with these communities in their regions.
“If you’re really inspired by me, then show it by tearing down barriers so I’m not the only disabled person of color taking part in races like this.”
Sojitra also notes that popular trail races often fill within minutes of registration opening, creating a massive hindrance for athletes who aren’t in the loop—which often includes disabled people. “A lot of word of mouth in the trail-running community is still white folks to white folks and nondisabled folks to nondisabled folks,” he says. “These variables really affect decision making when it comes to taking part in any of these events.” To combat this for the 2022 edition in September, the Rut worked with Inclusive Outdoors Project (Sojitra’s Bozeman-based business) to reserve 40 race spots for runners from historically underrepresented communities.
“The culture of the running world is incredibly rigid,” Sojitra says. “We talk about finding freedom in the hills, but ironically we create spaces that are only meant for a certain person.” People usually mean well, he says, but few trail races have made changes to better serve underrepresented athletes.
“The key is to let other voices in, integrate different perspectives, and build cultural cohesion,” Sojitra says. “That’s when barriers will be broken down, and factors like money and transportation become very visible.”
Change is happening, albeit slowly. Thanks to his large platform—53,000 Instagram followers and counting—many view Sojitra as a megaphone for adaptive athletes and people of color. But he is quick to acknowledge that he is just one of many working to create more accessibility in this space. “I stand on the shoulders of giants that came before me,” he says of activists like Judith Heumann and Grace Lee Boggs. “I personify a lot of these experiences from our community, but I don’t want to make any of this about myself.”
“I don’t need to keep boosting my ego and inflating my chest,” he says. “I’d rather borrow an expression from a lot of Black women revolutionaries and say, ‘I’d rather lift as I climb and sit on the summit with everyone.’ Let’s reduce that inspirational part and inspire others to create more accessible spaces.”