nine minutes. To me, that’s unheard of. I asked him, and he said he’d been doing super sets—he’d trained himself with power-lifting strategies with his good leg, his torso and his arms. … Tere was nobody here who was pushing him. He totally did it on his own, and he was ready.” As far as anyone knows, Lychik is the first ever to run that kind of distance with his particular injury.
A few weeks later, when they were on the third or fourth version of the pros- thesis, Lychik ran the Tough Mudder in the Texas hill country outside Austin. He was on a team with the Wounded Warrior Project, several of whom were amputees, and they helped one another over the obstacles, Kuenzi said.
Te prosthetist drove out to see Lychik run in the 12-miler and took some tools with him in case the prosthesis needed tweaking. “It was very inspiring to watch, because I would have thought he would have run a couple miles, maybe, and I
kept expecting to see one of those golf carts come up with him in it. He dis- appeared for a while and I went over to another area, and when he came by, he was loping along, carrying the flag. He was jazzed. … He finished it.”
In April 2014, Lychik, now medically retired from the Army, competed in the Boston Marathon, finishing the race in 4:44:25. Te News Tribune of Tacoma, WA, reported that Lychik ran with a team associated with the Martin W. Richard Charitable Foundation, formed to honor the 8-year-old boy killed in the 2013 marathon bombing. “I was running it for him,” the newspaper quoted Lychik saying. “He doesn’t have the opportunity, so I got to do it for him.” On May 4, he finished the Tacoma City Marathon.
Read more here:
http://www.thenews
tribune.com/2014/04/21/3159570/ bos ton-crowds -roa r-for-tacoma. html#storylink=cpy
COMMUNICATING SUCCESS Shortly before
the marathon, Lychik
spoke with a group of middle-school kids in the Tacoma area. He wants to spread a message of positive thinking and is work- ing on what he calls “my speech.”
“Te only person who can ever stop you is you. We put the limitations on ourselves. Right when I started to run, running 400 yards, a mile,
two
FIRST OF MANY Lychik runs in the Austin Marathon in February 2013, marking the first time a hip-disarticulation amputee had ever run a marathon. (Photo by Robert Kuenzi)
miles and then running another event, [I started to wonder], what else am I capable of doing? I wasn’t just going out and doing all of these events for myself. I wanted to show people that if some- body with one leg, a hip amputee, can go out and do this, what could a person with two good legs be capable of? Not just running. What are they capable of if they really set their heart and mind to it and persevere?”
During the months Lychik was in rehab at the Center for the Intrepid, Kuenzi said he saw the Soldier grow tremendously. Tat happens to a lot of the guys who come through the center, he said. “When they come in, they’re just a lump,” hav- ing been through a tremendous amount of stress from their injuries and recovery. And by the time they leave, “You can see the change. Tey’ve got motivation, they’re going to go to school. Tey’re going to do something with their lives.”
A year and a half after his life-changing injury, when Lychik was about to leave the military, he said, “I set out for a run in the evening, and I was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and it was very foggy. I was determined, and I knew where I was going with my life. At that moment, I stopped, I had tears in my eyes. I realized that this was me living what I once saw, envisioned in the hos- pital, when I was trying to reach out for the impossible.”
For more information, see Edward Lychik’s blog at
edwardlychik.wordpress.com or on Facebook at https://www.facebook. com/edwardlychik. For more information on the first-of-its-kind leg, contact Robert Kuenzi at
robert.s.kuenzi.ctr@mail.mil or 210-916-7740.
MR. STEVE STARK provides contracting support to the U.S. Army Acquisition Sup- port Center for SAIC. He holds an M.A. in creative writing from Hollins University and a B.A. in English from George Mason Uni- versity. He has worked in a variety of positions supporting communications for the Army and Navy, and has written about defense-related topics for more than a decade. He was the founding editor of the Program Executive Office Soldier Portfolio and edited the Army’s Weapon Systems handbook for six years.
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