Joker ... Ben McBean tells people his Mercedes 'cost an arm and a leg'
“In all fairness, I’d probably think I was a footballer if I saw me, but it’s good because if they think that, then they are not seeing my injuries, which means I must be doing all right.
“People say, ‘That’s a nice car, mate. Must have cost a fair bit,’ and I
tell them, ‘Yeah, it cost me an arm and a leg!’”It is five years since Ben stood on a Taliban landmine which blew off his right leg and left arm
It would have been easy to settle for life in a wheelchair and try to eke out his compensation to support himself for the rest of his life.
But Ben McBean is made of sterner stuff. The anniversary of the day he nearly died means more to his family than it does to him, he admits, adding: “Normally, for me, it’s kind of just another day.
“I might think, ‘Oh, it’s been five years’, but then I just crack on. But for
my parents, it’s ‘This was the day we almost lost our kid’.”
It was while Ben was recovering in hospital in 2008 that he found the inspiration to try to get back to some sort of normality.
He says: “I was lying there and the London Marathon was on TV. I knew I wanted to do something and that could be it, but I also knew I would have to get off my ar*e to achieve it.”
But first he had to get used to using a prosthetic leg, and he recalls falling over a few times.
He continues: “When they gave me my running leg I ran down a hill, fell over at the bottom, and the physio said, ‘Great. You’re ready’.”
Just a year after losing his limbs, Ben did his first London Marathon and says: “I didn’t do any training. I just rocked up on the day and I finished ahead of 11,000 people.
“I had to stop after 13 miles because all the skin on my stump fell off, so the next 13 miles was a bit of an epic.”
