By Kathryn Miles
Photos by Tristan Spinski
From our September 2024 issue
It wasn’t yet six in the morning at Mission Working Dogs’s sprawling new campus, in Oxford, but Christy Gardner, founder of the nonprofit group that trains service and therapy dogs, had already been out of bed for more than an hour. All was quiet around the training center and kennel, as well as among the eight tidy red cabins, where people can stay while learning to work with their support dogs. But in the main house, where she lives, Gardner was already grappling with how she would cram everything she needed to accomplish into the day. Trials for the 2024 U.S. Paralympic track-and-field team were just weeks away, after all, and she’d be competing in shot put. Meeting the demands of both full-time canine training and full-time athletic training had been proving no easy feat.
Gardner, who’s 42 years old, wore her hair pulled back in a severe bun, but her face was all easy smiles as she shooed 11 yearlings outside and then began preparing breakfast for them (she calls them “the kids”). Padding back and forth on two prosthetic legs, she alternated between filling water dishes at the sink and scooping cups of kibble into bowls. Once allowed back inside, the kids snarfed down their food while Gardner whipped up a quick meal for herself — microwaved oatmeal, with protein powder — then sent the pups outside again so that she could grab a quick shower.
Doug, an English cream golden retriever, is by Gardner’s side constantly, whether she’s working out in her home gym (seen here) or traveling for competitions.
Overseeing the entire operation was Doug, Gardner’s own certified service dog. During sled-hockey games and track-and-field events — Gardner represents the U.S. in both sports — Doug is all business, riding the bench with his human teammates, often donning his own custom jersey. At home, the five-year-old English cream golden retriever swings between supporting Gardner, playing referee to the little ones, and relishing his role as incorrigible goofball. “He’s a total goober,” Gardner said with a laugh. Doug is also, she added, utterly indispensable.
Eighteen years ago, Gardner was severely injured while serving in the army. Previous reports have stated that she was stationed in South Korea, along the DMZ, but she says that’s incorrect and that she’s not at liberty to discuss details of the event. Now a double amputee, with both legs removed below the knee, she relies on sophisticated prosthetics for her mobility. They’ve served her well, in international competitions and in more mundane pursuits, like daily poop patrol in her yard. But Gardner believes even the best prosthetic is a poor substitute for a service dog like Doug. Whether he’s warning her of an impending seizure (a side effect of the traumatic brain injury she sustained), fetching something she’s dropped, or providing moral support, his job is to make Gardner’s possible. “Service dogs give you so much more independence and save so much of your energy,” Gardner said. “That’s especially true for veterans — most of us don’t like to rely on other people for things.”
These days, Doug’s assistance has been more welcome than ever. Last winter, Gardner broke her hand playing sled hockey, and it’s been slow to heal, forcing the typically tireless Gardner to work at something less than her usual high tempo. And that’s made her Paralympic pursuit all the more difficult. On this particular day, for instance, she needed to squeeze in a gym workout and some shot-put throws. But a potential donor had asked for a tour of the Mission Working Dogs facility, and she had a physical-therapy appointment later for her injured hand, plus an appointment at a prosthetics clinic in nearby Auburn, to be fitted for a new carbon-fiber left leg.
Her left leg is her dominant one for throwing shot put, and its fit is crucial for the trials. She removed one of her current prosthetics to show me its various parts: a carbon-fiber foot, a torsion shock absorber, and a molded socket that cradles her residual limb. “If the shape is off by just a millimeter, it’ll make huge craters in my leg,” Gardner said. To get the fit just right, she needed to bring her throwing frame, an elaborate aluminum scaffold and series of ratchet straps required by the Games for seated throwers like Gardner. So she also needed to find the time to disassemble it and load it into her car. Once she returned home, it’d be another poop patrol and some training time for the dogs. Then, their evening meal and hers. After that — just maybe — she’d finally get around to lifting weights in her home gym.
The bronze statue on the Mission Working Dogs campus is a tribute to Moxie, Gardner’s first service dog. Gardner lives on the campus, in the blue house, while people being matched with service dogs can come for extended stays in the pod of eight red cabins.
It was a hectic schedule even for a high-performing athlete like Gardner. But she’s had her eyes on the Paralympic games ever since losing her legs, and she wasn’t about to dial back her preparations in these final weeks before the trials.
For as long as Gardner can remember, sports have been her greatest passion — not just something she enjoys but something she needs in her life. Since childhood, she says, she has “always been a little bit hyper and a little bit driven.” Those who know her well say that’s a colossal understatement. As a student at Edward Little High School, in Auburn, Gardner received special permission to participate in two sports each season: field hockey and club soccer in the fall, indoor track and basketball in the winter, soccer and outdoor track in the spring. When Long Island University offered her athletic scholarships for both field hockey and track and field, she jumped at the opportunity. When being one of only three female shot throwers came to feel isolating, she abandoned track and field and walked on to the women’s lacrosse team, convincing the coach to match her track-and-field scholarship.
Early in Gardner’s sophomore year, her whole trajectory changed when hijackers flew two planes into the World Trade Center. Long Island University’s campuses are in and around New York City, and Gardner remembers acutely feeling the fear and uncertainty that ensued. That first night after the attack, she and her lacrosse teammates hunkered down together in a single dorm room. Then, like many other young Americans in the wake of September 11, she committed to joining the military. “We all joined for essentially the same reason,” she says, “and that was because we were looking for an honorable career path after very turbulent times.”
Gardner had been in the army for almost two years when she sustained her life-altering injuries. The brain trauma damaged her memory and capacity for language. Her skull was fractured and one of her arms broken. But it was a severe spinal injury, impeding the use of her legs, that was hardest for Gardner to accept. “The polytrauma medical team told me I was 100 percent disabled and severely handicapped,” she says. “That was the worst part of it all.”
Gardner spent the next year and a half in military hospitals. By the time she was discharged, she’d learned to navigate her new wheelchair and leg braces. However, her formerly athletic frame had largely atrophied, and grand mal seizures required her to take extra precautions, including wearing a helmet all the time to prevent further brain damage.
Doctors warned against being active, saying that her body — especially her legs — were just too fragile. “They wanted me to just use my wheelchair and sit on the couch, and that was supposed to be my life,” she says. “I found that to be completely unacceptable. There was no way in hell I was just going to sit around for the rest of my life.”
A selection of snapshots, provided by Gardner, span her time in the army and her subsequent pursuits as a para-athlete. The photo of Gardner throwing shot put comes courtesy of the Wheelchair Sports Federation.
Instead, Gardner committed to returning to a full life. She received her first service dog, Moxie, a golden retriever trained to alert her to impending seizures and to help with mobility issues (Moxie was not named after Maine’s iconic soda, says Gardner, who has always preferred Mountain Dew). With Moxie’s help, Gardner began attending adaptive-sports clinics. At the first one, she tried kayaking and water-skiing. At the next, she tried wheelchair basketball. What really hooked her, though, was sled hockey, a full-contact sport in which players sit on a metal frame mounted on a skate blade and use two small hockey sticks with spikes on the butt ends to propel themselves around the ice.
Back home, Gardner began training with a local high-school girls’ hockey team. She worked on the core strength required to maneuver her sled. Eventually, she attended a national camp for sled hockey and earned an invitation to the U.S. team. Gardner loved competing and being on a team again. Her legs, though, kept getting in the way. Because she’d lost sensation in them, she couldn’t always tell if, say, she’d bashed them against something, experienced frostbite, or been stung by a bee. Meanwhile, the leg braces left lesions that wouldn’t heal. She began to worry she’d reached the limits of her new physical reality and that she might risk her health or even her life if she continued.
I don’t ever want to be limited by what-ifs. I would rather play and have fun and be successful now and deal with the repercussions later.
Her breakthrough came at yet another adaptive-sports clinic, this one held at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in Maryland. There, she sat in her wheelchair and watched as a group of double amputees carried heavy coolers of beer while hopping effortlessly onto a bus for an outing. “These guys had no legs, and yet they could do all of that,” Gardner says. “I kept thinking,
why can’t I do that?”
Beginning in 2014, she launched a series of crowdsourced fundraisers in an attempt to pay for a double amputation. By 2016, both of her lower legs had been amputated, and she was recovering at Walter Reed, where she then received her first set of prosthetics. Soon, Gardner was walking miles at a time. Six months later, additionally equipped with a pair of running blades, she ran her first five-kilometer race. Gardner had no idea how the blades would hold up, so she enlisted her brother to run alongside her, carrying a backpack loaded with heavy tools and extra parts, just in case either blade needed a repair. They didn’t. And Gardner’s brother got the workout of a lifetime trying to keep up with his sister.
Competing at the highest level of adaptive sports takes a toll. There’s a financial component: Prosthetic blades are expensive — thousands of dollars apiece. There’s the specialized throwing frame for shot put. Transportation and lodging for both her and Doug quickly run up a bill. And there’s the physical component: Gardner has experienced her fair share of injuries as an adaptive athlete — concussions and fractures. She now has arthritis in both of her hips. But all of that, she says, is a small price to pay. “I don’t ever want to be limited by what-ifs,” she says. “I would rather play and have fun and be successful now and deal with the repercussions later.”
Gardner’s athletic accomplishments are many. She is the only player who has played every position — forward, defense, and goalie — for U.S. women’s sled hockey. She has competed in international events and, in 2013, was named USA Hockey’s Disabled Athlete of the Year. Closer to home, she helped start Maine’s only sled-hockey team, the New England Warriors, in Lewiston. Somehow, she also went from never having surfed to representing her country at the International Surfing Association World Para Surfing Championship in less than a year. “That one was crazy,” Gardner admits. “To think the doctors were like, you’re so limited — you’ll never do X, Y, or Z. Then, I practiced for six months and walked on to a national team.”
In 2022, Gardner broke her own U.S. record in shot put at the Paralympic nationals (she also won discus that year). Last year, she earned silver in the Parapan American Games, against competition from North and South America. “She’s just a tremendous athlete,” says Adrienne Wilson, Gardner’s throwing coach and personal trainer. “She’s been a shining star from the start. She’s also so gracious, so helpful. Christy represents the U.S. in every best way possible.”
But despite Gardner’s long list of successes, the Paralympics have so far eluded her. For starters, although sled hockey is technically a coed sport at the Paralympics, male athletes almost always get all the roster spots. In 2020, Gardner was chosen for track-and-field trials and spent that spring training at an Olympic facility in California, Moxie by her side. As Covid swept the globe, the International Olympic Committee made the decision to postpone the games. She returned home devastated and ultimately didn’t qualify for the rescheduled games.
Not long after she got back to Maine, a local Lab breeder offered her a puppy, wondering if she would try training him. Gardner had been volunteering both at the breeder and for several service-dog programs. She’d developed a sense for how to pick dogs for temperament, how to shape behaviors using positive-reinforcement training, and how to teach humans to work with their service animals. At the time, Moxie was nearing retirement and fighting cancer. Her successor, Doug, was still preparing for his service-dog exam. Nevertheless, Gardner agreed. And since she never seems to be anything less than all-in, she figured she might as well take in a few other puppies as well. She raised over $9,000 for their care and training and, with that, Mission
Working Dogs was born.
Now, four years later, the nonprofit boasts a staff of five and raises hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. It opened its new Oxford campus this spring, and dozens of dogs — mostly golden retrievers and a few Labs — can be in training at any given time. (Those poop patrols happen with a five-gallon bucket in hand, and Gardner estimates the dogs go through at least 600 pounds of kibble each month.) Most of Mission Working Dogs’s clients are wounded veterans. Names that Gardner has given the dogs include Valor, Ranger, Star, and Liberty Bell. The latter is mother to the nonprofit’s newest litter. They’re trained to perform a wide range of tasks, from picking up dropped cell phones to helping their humans cope with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Josh Gould, a Maine native and Marine Corps veteran, was injured while serving during the Iraq War. He returned with what he calls “minor physical disabilities and huge PTSD issues.” Gardner had already been encouraging him for years to try a service dog when she brought in Eleanor, a rescued Bernedoodle, or Bernese mountain dog crossed with a standard poodle. For Gould, it was pretty much love at first sight. “Eleanor has changed my life,” he says. “I’ve tried all the medications forced on me since I got home. I tried self-medicating. None of it worked. But Eleanor does. She’s more in tune with my emotions than I am. She’s a superhero.”
The 11 young dogs currently residing with Gardner still have months, and in some cases years, of training ahead (service dogs usually go through about two years of training). Several are already destined for other veterans. Gardner’s own future, though, was less certain when this issue of the magazine went to press, before the track-and-field trials, which would take place a month before the Paralympic Games opened in Paris, in late August. But that’s okay, Gardner says. Uncertainty has been a big part of her life for a long time now.
She senses that hockey is a young person’s game and thinks this will probably be her last year on the U.S. team. It was at a national-team practice that she broke her hand this past spring, and she has worried that the injury will keep her from throwing shot put in Paris. But that’s okay too. “I’m already aiming for 2028,” she says. “Throwers in track and field are older. Competing into your 50s isn’t out of the question at all. I could still have a heck of a career ahead of me.” At the last summer Paralympics, seated throwers who medaled in the women’s shot put ranged in age from their early 20s to their mid-40s.
In the meantime, Gardner is happy in her other calling, as the leader of Mission Working Dogs. The organization just paired a dog with an international veteran for the first time. Other recipients report their lives have been forever improved because of Gardner’s dogs: they’re able to take their kids to fairs, say, or to attend their granddaughter’s high-school graduation. That may not seem so significant to an able-bodied person, but for someone like Gould, it means everything. “I didn’t know if I would make it once I returned home,” he says. “My kids saved my life the first time. Eleanor has saved it in another way.”
These days, Gould’s entire family volunteers at Mission Working Dogs, helping out with poop patrol, feeding, cleaning, and whatever else needs doing. For them, it’s a small way to thank Gardner for what she’s given them. “People need Christy and these dogs,” Gould says. “They’re better than any pill ever taken. They’re life-changing medicine.”
