A LEG UP
“I WASN’T JUST GOING OUT AND DOING ALL OF THESE EVENTS FOR MYSELF. I WANTED TO SHOW PEOPLE THAT IF SOMEBODY WITH ONE LEG, A HIP AMPUTEE, CAN GO OUT AND DO THIS, WHAT COULD A PERSON WITH TWO GOOD LEGS BE CAPABLE OF?”
THE MUD LEG An early iteration of Lychik’s running leg, which he used in his first Tough Mudder. (Photo by Robert Kuenzi)
TOUGH MUD DEADLINE For the uninitiated, a Tough Mudder is a 10- to 12-mile military-grade obstacle course based on a concept designed by the British Special Forces to test physical and mental strength. Te race involves challenges such as running through a field with live wires, plunging into freez- ing water, climbing a half-pipe slicked with mud and grease and scaling an 8- to 12-foot wall.
Regardless of how feasible Kuenzi thought it would be, the race provided a deadline for the team to finish the running pros- thesis. Lychik loved working with Kuenzi.
that Lychik kept asking, “‘When are we going to get this running prosthesis going?’ Another thing he said was, ‘We need to find some materials you can get wet and muddy, because I’m going to be doing that kind of thing.’
“Once we got that new socket fitted,”
Kuenzi continued, “the idea was to duplicate it and then start making a run- ning prosthesis. It really came to a point in August 2012 that we got that socket working pretty well, and Ed was getting more and more intense about it. Finally it came out that he had a ‘Tough Mud- der’ that he wanted to run that was in, like, the first weekend of October.”
126 Army AL&T Magazine
“Tere’s a lot of people who only stick to what they know. Tey don’t like to go outside the box,” he said. Not so Kuenzi, who is himself an amputee, having lost part of a leg in a motorcycle accident when he was 19, which was why he became a prosthetist. Lychik had a table in Kuenzi’s office with parts and tools. “I had a lot of demands on myself and on him,” Lychik said. “We would stay late hours. If some- thing didn’t work, we’d try different parts. It must’ve been exhausting for him.”
Teirs wasn’t just a professional rela- tionship, Lychik said. “It was like I was working with a friend, too. I could talk to him and tell him how I was feeling, it wasn’t like there was anything I couldn’t say. … And once you can connect with someone, you can combine a few like- minded people and create something really
July–September 2014
amazing. A lot of times I get the credit for doing this, but without people like Bob and Alicia—there’s a whole mountain of people who were there to support me. It was a team effort.”
Te first iteration of the new prosthe- sis, like the walking leg, had a hip and knee joint. With the prosthesis in place, Kuenzi and White hooked Lychik up in a harness that runs along a track of about 40 feet, part of the training apparatus for people learning to use leg prostheses.
“He was able to do some running on that, but it was pretty obvious that that setup wasn’t going to work because it was too unstable” with the articulation of the knee and hip, Kuenzi said. “First we took the knee out and just made it a straight leg, and then eventually took the hip joint out, too, and bolted the pylon to the socket. Tat really looked kind of like a pogo stick, and functioned like one, too.”
It resulted in a gait that was almost stride- bounce-stride. “He’d have to swing it out to the side to clear the ground. And all this time he’s having to use his core muscles, his abdomen and his upper body to stabi- lize his trunk and move it, do a pelvic tilt every step.”
AMAZING PROGRESS Tat’s why Lychik had been lifting weights. “What really amazed me about his progress was that within a week of getting this leg, he ran a mile in, like,
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