91Èȱ¬

Not that there's anything wrong with getting in wheelchairs, you understand. Though wobbling is my usual mode of self-transportation, I don't mind wheeling. I've done it before. I'll do it again. I like wheelchairs. They increase mobility.

But today I have my doubts. I'm not here for a laugh. I'm here to be classified. Yes, I'm about to become a number.

I'm finding out what's involved in starting out as a disabled athlete, and part of that process is 'classification' - working out how disabled you are, so you can compete in sports against people who have a similar level of impairment.

I've heard the process can be rather invasive. I've winced my way through International Paralympic Committee (IPC) manuals on the subject. I've read about 'bench tests' and 'functional status'. I've seen the diagrams of the movements athletes have to perform so that their class can be calculated. Those diagrams! It looks like it may hurt.

And now, Kenny McKay, a veteran wheelchair basketball player who classifies athletes at international level has offered to 'do' me. And I'm scared.

I'm in an Essex gym. This is not my natural habitat. Everywhere I look there are fit, toned people whizzing round at a hundred miles an hour in very shiny wheelchairs. There's the clash of metal on metal. There's sweat and there's shouting. Everyone's very friendly, but they're all taking it very seriously: it's a wheelchair basketball training session.

On my way in, someone tells me one of their team-mates couldn't be here tonight because he crushed his knuckle during last week's practice. Ow. I'm not the sporty type ... and sporting injuries do not appeal.

The thing: it has never occurred to me that elite athletics would be a sensible career option. I've got Cerebral Palsy. I went to mainstream school. When my classmates had PE, I either did physio, or went to the library and read books.

Disability sport has always seemed a weird concept to me. First defining characteristic of being a spaz? Limited mobility. Second? Lack of speed. So I've never quite understood why two spazzes would want to race against each other. Surely it's like having an orchestra for people who are no good at playing musical instruments. Besides, physical competitiveness is what the Normies do. To me, watching the Olympics is like watching a 'how-able-bodied-are-you?' contest.

I've been expounding this opinion for several years, to various degrees of disdain. My friends think I have a simple dislike of sport which I dress up as pretentious disability rhetoric.

"You've never tried it, so how do you know?" they say.

Which is how I ended up on a basketball court staring at a wheelchair, feeling uncharacteristically coy about the whole thing.

Everyone who competes in disability sport has to go through the process of classification. Athletes are sorted according to the type and severity of their disability. What this involves depends on the sport.

In wheelchair basketball, players get a classification between 1 and 4.5. Crudely, 1 is the least mobile and 4.5 is the most, with stuff like balance and co-ordination being taken into account as well. No team is allowed to have more than 14 points on the court at any one time.

One of the reasons I've always been cynical is because this all feels a bit medical to me - and we disableds hate to be defined by our inability and what's wrong with us. Usually it's my consultant I hear using terms like 'functionality' and 'range of movement', all of which come up very quickly when you start to discuss classification.

Kenny reassures me: "It's a sport. A player's a player. We didn't want to be doing medical testing. What matters is what's on court."

As a result, the basketball classification looks very specifically at the dexterity you need to play the game. Kenny shows me how he'd classify me. I get in the chair - and what a chair it is! I have a wheel around. You can move it with your hips. It's ace.

Then Kenny starts throwing balls at me from different angles to test me for mobility, balance, and so on. For example, if you can turn your head to look behind you, that's a really useful skill on court, so your grading is higher than if you can't. I can.

Basketball is relatively unusual in taking this sport-oriented approach. A conscious decision was made to move away from the medical aspects of the process, and as a result it's relatively painless.

But I've read manuals about other sports. Swimming, in particular. I can swim. It's the only sport I ever really do voluntarily. The IPC manual on the swimming classification system is one of the ones with diagrams that make me wince. They won't test non-athletes like me, so instead I call Nyree Lewis, a 26 year old champion swimmer who has a similar kind of cerebral palsy, and ask her what it involves.

She tells me some of it is quite straightforward, and there were some hilarious moments.

The classifiers asked her to lift her left leg. "When I started to, they said, 'no, that's your right leg', and I said, 'but I have to lift my left leg to lift my right leg!'" That sounds familiar - moving one bit of your body and another bit doing something else entirely! The kind of intimate moment I normally share with my boyfriend, my mother and my doctor - not complete strangers. Nyree doesn't seem to mind - but then, she's an athlete and she must be used to people pulling her around a bit.

The thing that sounds properly scary to me though is where, during the bench test, they test "the point at which your co-ordination fails," as Nyree puts it. Basically it seems to involve holding your arm out and opening and closing your hands. "They're saying 'do it faster, do it faster'" says Nyree, "until eventually you can't and your hands are flapping."

It all sounds like the most undignified physio session imaginable - not a prospect I'd relish. But Nyree is passionate about her sport and wasn't so daunted when faced with it: "It's something that I knew everyone has to go through." She swears it wasn't as horrible as I might be imagining. They do a similar battery of tests in the water, as well as observing the athletes racing.

Nyree will be swimming in Manchester at the Paralympic World Cup this week, and I'll watch her progress, but I don't think I'll be joining her in the water. I'm finding basketball might be more my style, and not just because of the groovy chair.

Although the basketball classification seems relatively user-friendly for wimps like me, I discover it is not without its own controversies, and that people do dispute the results from time to time. There are ones who argue the toss, claiming to be more disabled than their classification suggests. And there are others who don't realise how disabled they actually are, and are taken aback by the severity of the result. "Sometimes it's a bit of a shock to them," says Kenny.

Then there's the question of progressive impairments, as when a top Canadian player had her classification dropped at last summer's World Championships. "It was a big thing," says Kenny. "It's all about how you manage these things so people don't think, 'oh, she's getting an unfair advantage'."

Players have also been known to dispute the class of fellow players. Usually, it's because they perceive an athlete to be less disabled than they are. "They see somebody [with a low classification] and think, 'but she can stand up'. They often judge it from their own experience, so for a paraplegic to see someone who can walk... They don't realise that their back is probably in pain." It's all very complex and personal. Experienced players come to understand the reasons behind the decisions.

And then Kenny throws some more balls at me. I drop most of them. I zoom round in the chair and fall in love with it a bit. I'm speedier in the chair than I can remember ever having been in my life.

On one occasion, Kenny tries to work out how far I can lean forward - not all the way. We agree that's probably because I eat too many doughnuts, not because of the tragic nature of my spasticity. A bit of training will sort that out, he says. Right. Course it will.

Then the moment of truth. Time for my results: "You're somewhere around a Class 4," I'm told.

It's tricky to judge CPers because our co-ordination and perception can be so skewed, and that has a real impact on the game. I'd need to be observed on court before Kenny could make a final decision. So he invites me back for another go.

You know, I could be tempted. My heart is beginning to soften toward disability sport, if only because I want to spend some more time on those wheels. And then I look over and see one of the athletes crashing and tipping over their chair. Everyone's laughing, but I'm still a bit scared. I think maybe I'll stay watching from the sidelines for a bit longer.

• For the very latest on the Paralympic World Cup from Manchester, visit the 91Èȱ¬ Disability Sport website, listen to 5 Live and tune in to 91Èȱ¬2 on Sunday 13 May at 3:45pm