Not About to Slow Down : Antoinette Noel’s Latest Athletic Challenge Is the L.A. Marathon

The woman everyone calls Toni was born without arms, but Antoinette Noel has not let the disability stop her from setting goals--and accomplishing them.

She drives a car, plays soccer and softball, bowls, swims and snorkels.

And she likes to run. Today, the 31-year-old social worker, will face her biggest challenge in that sport--the seventh annual Los Angeles Marathon.

Noel, who holds a bachelor’s degree in education and a master’s in social work, is employed at Veterans Memorial Hospital in Loma Linda. She trains twice a week on the track at nearby Loma Linda University. Taking short, sideways shuffling steps, Noel puts in eight miles each session.

The Los Angeles course record for women is 2 hours 29 minutes 38 seconds. Noel hopes to cross the finish line in 6 1/2 hours. Her strategy to finish the 26.2-mile race will be to run, and walk, five miles every hour.

“By the time I come in, they will probably be announcing the winners, or everyone will have already packed up and be getting ready to go,” she said during a recent interview at her parents’ West Covina home.

“It’ll probably be about dusk,” she added as she leaned back on the sofa, twirling a key between her toes. Although she wears prosthetic arms much of the time, Noel prefers to perform most tasks with her feet and toes.

Noel’s goal is to complete the rigorous race--no matter how long it takes. She hurdles most obstacles with the same calm determination.

As a child at summer camp, Noel recalled, she longed to learn how to swim, but counselors were busy taking care of other handicapped children. One year, on the last day of camp, she convinced herself that she could swim.

“It took a lot of guts,” Noel said, explaining that she dunked her head in the water and pushed off, flapping her feet like she had seen others do. “When I stood up and saw I had moved, and not drowned, I yelled to the counselors, ‘Hey, I can swim! I can swim!’ ”

Doctors are unsure what caused her “congenital shoulder disarticulation,” but she quickly and instinctively adapted. When she was almost a year old, her parents recalled, someone dropped a dime on the floor. Before the person could bend down to pick it up, Noel, who was sitting on the floor, used her feet to scoot over and pick up the coin with her toes.

“When she was a baby, I told her that she was not handicapped,” said her father, Henry, a merchant seaman for 25 years. “The only handicapped person is a person without an education. I told her to try it all, that there is nothing you can’t do if you want to do it.”

Noel’s parents enrolled her in UCLA’s Child Amputee Prosthetic Program, where she was fitted with two artificial arms equipped with hooks for grasping things. While at UCLA, the child met with doctors and occupational therapists, who taught her how to eat, write and dress herself using the prostheses.

But Noel, who was more adept at using her feet, rarely used the devices until she entered a school for the handicapped at age 3.

At age 20, Noel felt the sting of discrimination when she took her driver’s test in the Ford Grand Torino her father bought from a former UCLA student with a similar condition.

When the examiner at the Department of Motor Vehicles office in West Covina saw that the applicant was steering with her feet, she failed Noel before the young woman drove out of the parking lot.

“I was shocked and devastated,” Noel said, recalling that she cried all the way home. “I felt like my whole life was over.”

But, Noel’s mother, Marion, reminded her daughter that she had never been a quitter, and encouraged her to go back to the DMV. Noel was assigned a different examiner and passed.

She now drives a white, two-door, Subaru Legacy equipped with a round, steel steering disc on the floor that she maneuvers with her left foot. She also uses her feet to activate a handle attached to the turn signals. Everything else in the car is standard equipment.

After graduating from Bassett High School in La Puente in 1976, Noel enrolled at Citrus College in Glendora and matriculated to Cal State Fullerton. She earned her master’s at Cal State Sacramento in 1985.

It took another year to land her first job at the Long Beach Naval Station’s Family Service Center.

“I’ll never forget that day,” Noel said. “All my life I wondered if I would ever get a job, because so many able-bodied people couldn’t find a job. But, I felt I was a contributing individual to society, not someone depending on society to take care of me.”

She counseled families about loneliness, marriage problems, child abuse and parenting. She also boarded Navy ships to conduct pre-deployment workshops, preparing crews for overseas tours.

“She accomplished things by being a positive individual,” said Ralph Mays, human resources coordinator at the naval station. “She did her job well and she didn’t miss a beat.”

In 1987, Noel was named the outstanding handicapped employee in her department. She also received a certificate of recognition from the federal government, Mays said.

After more than five years on the job, Noel wanted a change so she joined the VA. She now works in two surgical wards with 90 beds, more than twice the load similar social workers handle. She counsels patients, helping them adjust to illness or disability after arm or leg amputations.

“Seeing me lets them know that it’s not the end of the world,” Noel said recently while on duty.

Noel never complains about her workload and has a positive attitude, said Dock Voorhies, a supervisor in the hospital’s social work department.

“She’s like a dream employee,” he said. “You have to admire her. . . . You couldn’t ask for more.”

Noel spends about 90% of her time talking with patients. Afterward, she goes to the nurses’ station to write reports. She slips into a chair, rolls over to the patient charts, slips off her shoe and flips through the rows. After making a selection, she puts the chart on the floor and begins writing, with her toes holding the pen.

Noel usually brings a bag lunch to work--typically a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bottle of juice and fruit. It is easier to prepare than cooking a full meal, she said. She has done her own cooking since moving out on her own in January, 1989. She also washes her clothes, vacuums and mops at her condominium in Ontario.

In her spare time she swims, reads and spends quiet evenings with her boyfriend, Byron Coleman, a 32-year-old truck driver from Pomona, whom she has been dating for two months. They met two years ago in Las Vegas.

Noel hopes to marry someday and have one child--a girl “to dress pretty.” She figures that one child would create fewer problems than she caused her mother, who also has two older sons and two younger daughters.

When Noel was a youngster, she used to throw rocks, climb trees and fashion wings of cloth for herself and her friends, daring them to jump off the roof of the house like she would do, her mother recalled.

“‘Jump off, you won’t hurt yourself,”’ the little girl would say.

“I wanted to be normal,” Noel recalled, “so I attempted everything everyone else was doing.”