Before he became a national champion, a Ph.D. candidate, or a Paralympic hopeful, Casey Orndorff was just a high school kid trying to keep up. When he walked onto the campus of WVU Tech in Montgomery, he had big dreams for his future. But in the back of his mind, he knew he didn’t have as much time as his classmates to reach those goals.
Orndorff, a native of High View, West Virginia, graduated from Hampshire High School in 2009. He ran cross country and track, played football, and was manager of the women’s basketball team at Hampshire High.
He originally applied to West Virginia University’s main campus in Morgantown, but was introduced to WVU Tech by an admissions counselor. She explained Tech was smaller, more STEM focused, and, most appealing to Orndorff, they had a cross-country team. She put him in contact with the coach, and visited campus, enrolling in the fall of 2009.
Orndorff joined the cross-country team and became heavily involved in practically every club and organization Tech had to offer. Alongside with former basketball coach Bob Williams, he resurrected the Monty mascot on campus. However, there was one thing that Orndorff didn’t disclose to any of his coaches or peers for his three of his years at Tech – he has Cerebral Palsy (CP). It wasn’t until his senior year that he disclosed his disability.
“My Cerebral Palsy is invisible until it’s not,” Orndorff said. “My senior year was probably my worst season, because I got hurt early in the season. Withholding information about my CP, my coach didn't understand why I was getting so fatigued, and eventually I injured my non-affected leg due to overcompensating.”
Cerebral palsy (CP) is a condition affecting how a person moves and controls their muscles. It occurs when a baby’s brain is damaged or does not follow the standard course of development, usually before or during birth. Those with CP may have stiff or weak muscles, trouble with balance or may move in ways that look different.
His senior year, Tech’s cross-country team qualified for nationals, which was a big achievement for a small team. However, an injury set him back, and he finally made the decision to disclose that he’d been running with CP all four years. He didn’t feel like he could hide it anymore.
“I don't have full use in my right side. I do have use of it, but there are certain things that I can't do. Because of that, as I try to move, my body tries to resist that movement,” Orndorff explained. “One of the things that I have had an issue with is with my right side, I have issues with managing my stride and coordination on my foot, so it lands abruptly, and, of course, restricts my hip extension due to dystonia and causes random hip drop. When I run, it looks like I’m fine. But when you start looking at me closely, you'll see my right side only extends to about three quarters to half as far of my left side.”
Competitive Running and Paralympic Dreams
Orndorff found his love of running in high school when he began running with a friend.
“I was not the most coordinated person. My brain damage is like, you are going to be uncoordinated, but I did a two-mile run with him. It was the first time I ever ran on the track. He lapped me twice. By the time he did eight laps, I had done six laps. I was like, ‘Yeah, I don't want to feel this way ever again’. So, I started running more and weightlifting.”
At the time, he said, his disability wasn’t always apparent. His coordination struggled. He signed up for track and field and set his sights on becoming faster. Then, he discovered cross-country, and felt it was much less restrictive than track and field events. Things clicked when he began running cross-country.
“I ran one of the hardest courses in the state [at Davis and Elkins]. I ran a 23-minute 5k, but that's when I started to realize I liked this. I was able to zone out and just focus, I wasn't sweating a lot. I was just in the zone. During that race was probably the best I felt in a race at that point in my life. Everything was just peaceful. Everything was good,” he said. “Among able-bodied athletes, I managed to place 3rd in a crowded field.”
Orndorff graduated with a 4.0 in 2013 – running all four years and becoming a fixture on campus. He joined Louisiana Tech as a Ph.D. candidate in computational analysis and modeling. While there, he pursued groundbreaking cancer research and biomedical engineering alongside mathematics and computer science studies. After successfully defending his dissertation , Orndorff joined the math department as an adjunct professor at Louisiana State University-Alexandria and a year later as a faculty member University of the Ozarks in Arkansas, respectively. It was in Arkansas that he stepped back onto the track, but another obstacle was waiting for him.
Orndorff was diagnosed with a heart condition not long after he started training to run. He was told long-distance running would not be possible for him. But Orndorff did not stop. More recently, he was also diagnosed with a seizure disorder and realized he was even having seizures while running. He found they were largely triggered by stress. With medication, he’s managed his illnesses, but they are reminders his dreams would not wait.
Now 34 years old, he’s set his sights on making the Paralympic team in 2028. He also competes regularly in national races, and has made a name for himself, setting records in nearly all events.
He recently competed in the Move United National Championships for Track and Field. He won first place in the 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, shot put, discus, and long jump in the M35 age group for the T38 and F38 divisions.
“If my research is right, I'm the first person in the history of athletics to hold a national record in sprints, distance, throws, and jumps,” Orndorff says. “Unofficially for my age group (leveraging IPC rankings and filtering by age group), I currently rank top five in the world in each event.”
Orndorff currently holds 16 National Championships in Track and Field, and eight national records in track and field. He also won a national championship in Boccia, a precision Paralympic ball sport designed for athletes with physical disabilities affecting motor skills, this year in his debut season.
He’s also the first known athlete with CP to break the two-hour barrier in the half marathon and held the world’s best time in the half marathon on four occasions between 2018 and 2022. He’s also a six-time champion of the Little Rock Half Marathon’s Physically Challenged Division and set a course record of 1:42:45.
In 2024, he competed at the U.S. Paralympic Trials, earning top-five finishes in the T38 100m and 400m, and was honored as the Senior Athlete of the Year by the Endeavor Games Foundation. He’s continuing to train and hopes to make the U.S. Paralympic Team in 2028.
Remarkably, his ambitions don’t stop there. He would like to get back to distance running and run the major marathons of the world: Boston, Chicago, New York, Tokyo, London, Berlin, and Sydney. He hopes to become a motivational speaker and potentially get sponsors while he’s training.
“I want to try to be a professional runner. I want to go and try to run marathons, if my body will let me, because the marathon is a whole another beast, for sure,” he said.
While Orndorff is always thinking about the next challenge, he’s also looking ahead. For him, personal accomplishment is rewarding, but clearing the way for others with the same experience is a growing passion.
He also noted several challenges in classifying athletes at the paralympic level, which he says would be something he’d like to get into as well as coaching. Classifying athletes with disabilities can be a complex, and sometimes subjective, process.
“I’d like to become a classifier to ensure that people with CP are being represented in these classification appointments, just because we need that. We need former athletes coming back and helping shape the sport,” he explained. “I may never be a Paralympic medalist, but I've been there, competitively as an athlete, and listening to athletes’ struggles while dealing with my own. I understand what a person with disability in these divisions should look like from a competitive perspective. Especially since I have a biomedical background, I understand all the medical documentation. We need to have more people like that, because a lot of these people that are classified have the medical background, but they don’t have the first-person experience of living with the disability. They're just seeing from technical perspective and being trained on that,” he explained.
Orndorff’s ambitions are tempered only by the constant reminder that the stopwatch clocking his race to achieve his dreams may have less time on it than others. With the culmination of a seizure disorder, heart condition, and the spasticity from his Cerebral Palsy, Orndorff knows that every second counts and understands the gift of time that he’s been given. He manages these conditions with medication and help from his medical team, but it was a grim reminder that the seconds are counting down.
Orndorff estimates he may only have about 15 years left to run, or even walk, without assistance. It’s not a guarantee, but it is a motivator, he says.
“I’m not afraid,” he says. “But I’m aware. That’s why I want to do everything that I possibly can right now,” Orndorff said. “If my Paralympic dreams don’t happen, it’s my goal to set all the national records in every event I can.”
Regardless of national or international titles, at the end of the day, Orndorff wants to be a role model for others who have CP or other disabilities. He is looking forward – toward his legacy and toward a future where others with CP know they can achieve their dream and reach their own finish line.
“I want to make sure that I'm that burning beacon in the distance that people can point to and say, ‘That's the way we have to go to make sure that we can live our lives as fully as we can with this disability.’”