Paralyzed teen Noble Haskell walks again, but won't stop there
If you watch old videos of Noble Haskell running you can hear the crowd screaming at him to encourage him.
"Too strong! Too strong!" yells a man in the crowd.
It seems no two words can describe him better than those. His freshman year at Smoky Hill High School he discovered running.
"I quickly fell in love with it, and I was good at it," he said.
Noble joined the track and cross country teams at Smoky Hill and was having great success. In the summer of 2021 he and some of his running buddies decided to go on a road trip. That's when his life changed.
"We had fun the whole time there, but on the way back I was rear ended," he said.
The car was totaled and Noble had a spinal cord injury. His mom says he couldn't move, even to scratch his own nose. His future was suddenly uncertain, but Noble says God had a plan for him.
"Nobody knew, especially me, what would happen after this," he said. "Me and my whole family just felt a strong sense of peace over us and we believe that's from God who just gave us a premonition that was like, 'hey you are going to be alright. It's going to be a long journey ahead of you, but eventually you will be walking again. You will be running again."
Noble took all the dedication and grit he learned from running and directed it toward his physical therapy. By the end of his senior year he walked to get his diploma at his high school graduation.
"I think a lot of people who don't know me as well they were pretty surprised but some of my friends that are closest to me, I'm sure they weren't surprised. I'm sure they always knew," Noble said.
It's a comeback he says isn't complete yet. He still wants to run again and he says the lessons he learned from the sport will help him get there.
"The body can endure so much more than the mind can, as long as you push through the moments where your mind is telling you 'hey you can't do any more. You gotta stop.' I find myself doing that all the time and I think I learned a lot of those traits from cross country and track."
Noble his holding a 5k run June 10 to raise money for more treatment. Other people can register to run it with him while he walks all 3.1 miles with them.
