It is an interesting thing. For some, their biggest physical accomplishments in life, their grandest adventures, come after only immense physical hardship. Something about veering so close to the line between life and death, mobility and incapacity — they choose not just life, but quite a lot of it, all at once, in ways they hadn’t necessarily before life took a physically immobile turn.
So it was with Hilary Lister. A woman for whom life confined to a bed was more distressing than sailing the open seas of the North Atlantic, totally alone, with little experience on the water — and no use of her hands and feet. In 2009 Lister, a quadriplegic, became the first woman with a disability to sail solo around Britain. Her arrival at that point was remarkable.
Hilary Claire Rudd was born on March 3, 1972, in Hook, in Hampshire, the third of four children. Her father, Colin, was a vicar; her mother, Pauline, was a biochemist who later became a professor
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