Bright Horizon

Erin Martin, ‘13, who will be competing in the 2026 Milano Cortina Paralympics in Nordic skiing, gets a sense of freedom from training and racing in the snow.

“Snow is the least accessible thing on the face of the earth for wheelchair users,” says Martin, 39, a nursing alum who first tried Nordic skiing in 2019. “And so it’s pretty fun to be able to get out and explore in the snow. It's very empowering.”

As a part of Team USA, Martin will be traveling in March to Northern Italy to the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Paralympic Games, one of 665 athletes competing in 79 events across six sports. Leading up to the winter games, Martin trained six days a week, 11 months a year. An avid athlete and lover of the outdoors, she also strength trains and hand cycles as well as rides an adaptive mountain bike.

The two purely skiing events in which she plans to compete are a 1-kilometer sprint and 10-kilometer race, but she also added the biathlon, where skiers race a circuit while stopping and shooting an air rifle at a target 10 meters away, or about 33 feet. She leaves for Italy on March 1 for the games, happening March 6–March 15.

For skiing, Martin sits in a specialized chair attached to a frame on two cross country skis, called a “bucket,” and propels herself forward with poles in each hand.

“It's very, very endurance focused,” she says. “For people who love the experience of getting away, getting out in nature and exploring, having that sense of accomplishment from working hard and being in your body, feeling that sense of power and endurance, it's a great sport for that.”

Martin was paralyzed and sustained other serious injuries in 2013, just before graduating from Seattle University, when she fell about 30 feet while on a trip in the Cascade Mountains near North Bend.

She sees her visibility as an athlete on the world stage as showing people, including kids and others with disabilities, what is possible.

“As someone who very much cares about other people and wants to make life better for other people, I think that that is a really important component of living the athlete lifestyle and sharing my story about being an athlete,” she says.

A daughter of two nurses, Martin grew up around health care and even tagged along with her dad to Take Our Daughters to Work Day. After looking into different career paths, she decided on nursing, as it provided a dynamic environment and a meaningful career. She works as an RN care manager at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

Following her values is what led her to Seattle University.

“I really identified with the social justice focus that comes with the education at a Jesuit university,” she says. “I thought having that lens for my nursing training really aligned with my values and would prepare me to deal with a lot of the complex situations that come up in health care.” 

Martin, who grew up in South Dakota and now lives in Lynnwood, Wash., is familiar with shooting but until recently hadn’t been drawn to the event. Now she sees it as an extra challenge.

“There is something really cool about the combination of a really hard endurance sport with the highly structured, very precise effort that it takes to shoot accurately,” she says. “You have to shoot as quickly as you can because I can't spend two minutes waiting for my heart rate to come down. So it's added complexity for sure.”

In addition to traveling to Italy and skiing in the Dolomite Mountains—where her partner Jon and friend Heather will join her—what she treasures most about the experience is coming together with a group of other athletes with disabilities. This is Martin’s second Paralympics, first competing at the 2022 Paralympics in Beijing, placing 15th in the 7.5-kilometer race and 16th in the 1-kilometer sprint.

“We have this shared experience of representing our countries, working hard in competition, doing the best we can, putting together as good of a race as we can,” she says. “The shared comradery and experience that comes with that is something that's really special and not something that I get anywhere else in my life, especially with the different cultures and different languages.”