She started the morning taking her two 4-H pigs, Yorkshire-Hampshire crosses named Tucker and Alice — Alice has not grown into a sow yet, but close enough — for one of their regular exercise trots around part of the Norman family’s 23-acre farm in the southeast corner of Greene County, a few miles from Jamestown.
“She’s just super good with pigs,” said her dad Tim, a Cedarville University engineering professor. “She can let all of them out and let them roam around and then she gets them all to come back together. I can’t do it. I’m afraid they’ll go in all different directions, but what she does is pretty amazing. She’s definitely the pig whisperer.”
You see that when she takes you out to the barn and the pigs, as soon as they hear her voice, come running and stick their snouts through the fence looking for attention.
“Hi guys,” she said lovingly as she gave their heads a scratch. “These are my little babies.”
Later, back in the house, she would spend part of her evening putting the zipper into the elaborate brocade gown she has spent four months making for another 4-H project that — like the pigs — she will take into competition at the upcoming Greene County Fair.
“It’s like a replica of the Pirates of the Caribbean dress worn by the main girl, except I made some alterations” Grace said. “I made a big long train in the back and there’s a different kind of lace we found in a website from Korea. And there’s a big underskirt that shows in the front.”
And that skirt is silk, said Grace’s mom, Robin.
Between these exercises of sow and silk, Grace had a full day of other involvements, as well:
• In the morning, with a Flex Foot Cheetah — the type of J-shaped carbon fiber prosthetic once made famous by the now infamous Paralympian and Olympian Oscar Pistorius — attached to her left leg, she went out for a training run along the nearby country roads that are flanked by fields of corn and soybeans.
Were it another day she might have cycled along these same routes or gone to Yellow Springs to train in the swimming pool at Antioch College.
All of this is in preparation for a daunting schedule that begins today with the Caesar Creek Triathlon. And two weeks from now she’ll be in Rotterdam, Netherlands for the Paratriathlon World Championships.
Then in September she’ll be in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she’ll tackle a difficult double in the 2016 Paralympic Games.
She’ll represent the U.S. in the first triathlon and then the next day, as a member of the track and field team, she’ll run the 400 meters.
• Come afternoon the other day, she was busy in the kitchen baking a chocolate cake she would decorate elaborately with icing that would resemble a whimsical summer scene of grass, insects and flowers.
It was part of a five-cake project — each decorated differently — that she would enter in the fair’s baking competition, which was prejudged Saturday in Xenia.
• Before the day was done, she also planned to work with the Alpine goats she’ll take to the fair. Maybe there would be another session with the pigs, as well.
While all this may seem like a hectic schedule, to 18-year-old Grace — who just graduated from Xenia Christian High School, had her graduation party Saturday night and heads to Cedarville University next month — sees it differently.
She said these two weeks at home, working on 4-H projects and being around her family, are a way to relax and recharge her batteries.
After all, in the past five weeks, she competed against able-bodied runners in the high school state track championships at Jesse Owens Stadium in Columbus — finishing ninth in the 1,600 meters and sixth with her 4-x-800 meter relay team — and then the next day flew to Utah to compete in a triathlon and train for two weeks.
Last weekend she was at the U.S. paralympic track and field trials in Charlotte, N.C., where she won her class in the 400 meters and took a bronze medal in the 200-meter sprint.
Right now, Grace Norman is almost certainly the most celebrated teen athlete in the Miami Valley.
Last year, she made Ohio history when she became the first amputee to qualify for the state track meet, where she finished eighth in the 1,600.
At the Metro Buckeye Conference swim meet last year, against a field of boys and girls, all able-bodied, she won the 500-meter event even though she was kicking with one foot.
She’s also now the top-rated women’s paralympic triathlete in the United States.
And as she becomes better known, she also becomes much more traveled.
Last year she competed in triathlons in Qatar and a pre-Olympic test event in Rio de Janeiro.
“The people in Rio were wonderful,” she said. “They were lining the streets and cheering. It was so cool.”
So what of the new fears plaguing the upcoming Games there?
“I’ll take precautions, but I’m fine,” she said. “The water I raced in last year was fine.”
As for the possibility of mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus, she shrugged:
“I’ll be wearing bug spray. A lot of bug spray.”
Inspiration to many
Grace was born without her left foot and ankle and her right big toe because on an amniotic band disorder, a condition where fetal parts in the womb — often digits or limbs — become ensnared in fibrous bands. The condition can cause everything from amputations to miscarriages.
From the start, though, Grace was undaunted.
Robin said of their three kids — Bethany is older and Danielle is younger — Grace was the only one to crawl out of her crib and explore on her own. At 11 months, without a left foot, she began trying to walk. Two months later she had her first prosthetic.
While Grace never wanted any quarter, she received none either.
“(The Lord) gave Grace the right personality and He put her in the right family,” Robin once told me.
As Tim put it the other day: “Even as a little kid, Grace had the attitude ‘I’m gonna do this no matter what.’ It didn’t take much. Give her a little stimulus and she’s really onto it … and then she wants to be the best at it.”
Tim and Robin have athletic backgrounds. He has competed in masters swimming and triathlon events. Robin was a prep track star in Indiana, ran at Purdue and has been the girls track coach at Xenia Christian. And Bethany was an accomplished distance runner, first at Xenia Christian and now at Cedarville University.
“When I was younger, I wanted to be just like my sister,” Grace said. “I wanted to run as fast and because I was born with that competitive nature, I’d try to beat her.”
And almost as much as Danielle, who’ll be a junior at Legacy Christian Academy (formerly Xenia Christian), Grace likes working with the farm animals and taking part in 4-H.
She said one of the best things her parents did was get the three girls involved in 4-H. She said it teaches lessons of responsibility, stresses work ethic and builds family unity.
“I like to be more than just an athlete,” she once told me. “Athletics are very important to me, but so are other aspects of my life.”
And so she was involved in music, in school and in church, and with 4-H her projects go from pigs, goats and chickens to sewing and modeling.
Last year at the fair she won the All-Around Showmanship award with her goats.
Yet, she’s still best known for her athletic achievement. And while she has won considerable admiration from the able-bodied athletes she competed against — and often beat — in high school, she’s struck the deepest chords with other para-athletes, especially those who are younger.
They or their parents often come up to her at races or contact her on Facebook. Some kids from around the country have even interviewed her for school projects.
“I make sure to take time for the younger para-athletes,” she said. “I want them to do what I did. I want them to be inspired and continue in sports.
“I always tell them, ‘Don’t give up.’
“A lot of people might look at them and go, ‘Oh, you have a prosthetic’ or, ‘You’re in a wheelchair, you’re gonna be slow.’
“And I tell them: ‘No! That’s not true. You can do anything if you put your mind to it and work hard and just don’t give up.’ ”
‘Not just about me’
A little over three years ago — on an unseasonably cold night at an otherwise forgettable track meet at Bellbrook High — then-15-year-old Grace stood in the infield and managed a warm smile as she told me about the big plans she had.
She said she hoped to be in the Paralympics.
The dream seemed mighty distant that night and yet just 10 days ago Grace was officially announced as the youngest (and one of the most accomplished) members of the U.S. paralympic triathlon team headed to Rio. Three days later she was named to the paralympic track and field team, as well.
“I’m honored and excited to be going to Rio,” she said. “It’s not just about me. I’m representing my country, my school, all the people who have helped me, other para-athletes and especially Jesus Christ, who has made this possible.”
The task will be tough, not just because of the back-to-back schedule of her events, but because in her TP-4 triathlon category she competes against athletes who might be missing a hand, but not part of a leg.
While those athletes can move from the swimming to the biking and then the run with ease, Grace — who swims without her prosthetic — must first be carried to the water. Then after he swim, she must shed her wet suit, put on one prosthetic leg for cycling and then switch legs for her run.
Those pit stops, even as streamlined as she has them, add 40 seconds that she must try to make up by getting faster. And, except for top-rated Lauren Steadman of Great Britain, she was able to do that last year at the Rio test event and she finished second.
She said over the past seven months — under new coach Wesley Johnson — her techniques and strategies have improved and her times have come down.
And though she is known as a distance runner and not a sprinter, she did set an American record in the T-44 class at the 400 last week, and that ensured her that second ticket to Rio.
It came because of that don’t-give-up attitude she’s embraced her entire life.
“It goes back to how I was raised,” she said. “My parents raised me to be just like my older sister and my younger sister.
“I was raised as normal.”
Just then the buzzer on the stove went off. Her cake was ready.
On the nearby chair lay her elaborate Pirates of the Caribbean dress she would soon finish. And outside — beyond the back stoop where a few pairs of her running shoes had been left until her next training session — awaited her goats and especially those pigs, who were ready to follow her silken whispers.
Once reminded of all that, Grace thought about what she’d just said and started to laugh:
“Oh, I guess I’m not that normal.”
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