 Hello there my beautiful net friends welcome back to my channel. Thank you so much for joining me here today Today I get to share with you guys something that is currently behind me that you can't quite see that I have been wanting to share With you guys for about three months now It is one of the coolest gifts I've ever been given and this enabling me to do really cool things so without further ado And crazy grateful to be able to share this video with you guys today Something absolutely amazing happened a couple months ago And I wanted to share it back then but I wasn't able to because then I got really sick and I had to recover from that on a Respiratory level before I could actually you know exercise and push myself again But I was given one of the greatest gifts I've ever been given by a good friend of mine and a really cool company And I wanted to tell you guys about it and show you what it's enabled me to do So the long and short of it is one of my best friends Megan submitted me to a contest for Peloton Peloton is an indoor But I should probably look up the way that they describe themselves They have an indoor bike and a treadmill and both of those are connected to awesome instructors and community and it's really cool And I'd always heard about it and knew of them and it was like maybe one day if I'm rich and famous I would get myself one of those but it was never like a Reality for what I would ever think I would actually do but my friend had one of these bikes And she knew of a program called the comeback program through Peloton where you can submit your story or someone else's story And if Peloton resonates with them they pick 50 people every month to give a bike and all the equipment to and Amazingly my friend submitted me and they picked me which I am so grateful for both to Megan for writing Lovely lovely words about my story and taking the time to do so and also for Peloton for giving me this equipment that Enables me to feel freaking capable again, which is so cool Like I said, I got this bike which I'm about to show you and show you like how I what we had to do to Modify it so I could actually ride it because I can't ride it with this leg but when I first got on it it was seven o'clock the night that it arrived and Started biking and then I just broke down in tears because I realized that I felt whole Like I felt like I was okay I felt like I was just any old person not dealing with any kind of physical limitations or Differences just riding a bike and just pushing myself and being like yeah, I want to get better at this I didn't feel like an amputee. I didn't feel like I was dealing with any kind of disability or life challenge or physical challenge I just felt like myself for the first time when it comes to doing something physical in a very long time That in itself was such an incredible gift Riding a bike is not as easy as I thought in theory when I first thought about riding a bike with an amputation But that okay, no big deal like I can walk with my leg I'm sure I can bike with it But the reality is that I can't because listen, I don't know if you know this but to ride a bike you have to actually bend your knee, you know up and down and This leg with the way that it supports me for walking and everyday life the back of it Which is you know hard. It's like carbon fiber in the back Doesn't allow me to bend my knee enough to make a full range of motion when I am riding a bike And that kind of came as a surprise to me. I was like, oh Can we just cut it down more like would that work? But apparently in my situation no because cutting that down back here would compromise the support that it gives me in everyday life So my amazing prosthetist Zach Decided that he was going to modify one of my old sockets Zach. Thank you. This is amazing turn into a completely different kind of Socket system which you can see right there with the pin on the bottom get me on a bike one way or another I think this is a wrench every morning. I have to use equipment of this little little wrench device here I think it's a wrench. I hope it's a wrench I'm gonna get roasted forever in the comment section if it's not one to disassemble and then reassemble my leg and I've gotten it down What actually goes pretty quickly? So let's get ready for a ride this afternoon to actually get on the bike I need to take my leg off completely as you can see There are basically two major parts to prosthetic legs the socket which actually attaches to my body and then the rest of The leg which is my foot and my ankle and I can actually screw that off pretty easily And that's what I have to do to actually get on a bike So there are three screws that I have to loosen which is sometimes a challenge because I have to really tight Is that the wrong way? That's the wrong way cool because I have to really tighten them first I like that I said that I got good at this before showing you that pathetic footage I think I tighten these a little too tight last time and now the fun part of literally just Unscrewing my foot success. This looks terrifying then I have the pin lock socket, so I'm gonna screw this puppy on Align it properly because otherwise I'm gonna be biking with my leg at a very strange angle I think I've mentioned this before but one of the biggest surprises to me with this whole amputation thing was the fact that I guess This shouldn't be such a surprise, but one piece of equipment doesn't work for everything So you have one leg for for walking for hiking. You're gonna have another leg for running You're gonna have another one for biking possibly like depending on how your prosthetic system is So my biking leg is based on a pin lock system This little part clicks down into the base of the leg this type of prosthetic attachment was suggested to me during the beginning of Looking to prosthetics and I didn't like it in theory So we never really tried it out for me And I'm glad that I made that decision because trying to walk around on a pin lock leg is not my favorite But it works perfectly for biking So it was like the ideal middle ground for me, but I do so much for my computer I do have to change out my liner go from the one that I generally use every day to the pin lock with a little button on The end usually these are a lot longer But since they were doing me a favor and helping me put together a pin lock socket for a bike on a budget They just gave me what they had which was awesome So the placement of how this actually gets on my leg is super important because the pin has to come out like right at The bottom, but I've gotten hopefully pretty good at it. I guess we'll see I feel like that looks good enough Get all the dog hair off now. I'm able to just click in Listen closely There we go. Another really cool thing that Peloton did for me, which I was really grateful for is they gave me two different sizes of shoes When they arrived to actually deliver the bike I asked if it'd be weird if I called corporate and asked Maybe if I could return one of the shoes and get a different size because it's really hard to get shoes on my prosthetic foot And especially if I'm trying to do this like every morning when I'm groggy and out of it and trying to wake up for Day trying to like wrestle a shoe onto a foot is a process and I was thinking well Maybe you know, maybe I'll just buy another pair or whatever and they were like, you know what? Don't worry about it and just gave me two pairs that I can use however I want and so I have one shoe that is a size larger than the other to thank you Peloton for that So usually I'd have to like use a shoe horn to get this on but because it's a little bit bigger I'm good to go So you may have actually seen this on my Instagram a couple months ago I posted like morning stories as I'm riding was really weird for me to get used to clipping into bike shoes because I've never done that before I've always just used like tennis shoes on a bike, but I've gotten the hang of it Which is good and now I feel like a real biker now clipping on the prosthetic side is always a little more challenging But I got it There are some warnings when I start my ride and then I realize that I haven't put my foot at the right angle So I have to like get all unclipped stop the ride restart it get unscrewed get a screw back on put in the Right position, but I've been able to start guessing what the right position for my foot is a little bit better And so the morning's go a little faster And Cody down there for a second So there's a brief period of recovery the coolest thing about this to me is that I have a place That's like low impact where I'm not gonna hurt my leg pushing myself I'm like really getting my heart rate going which is really cool Because mother I can't even talk him out of breath most activities that I would try to do right now Like the most I can do is walk and even that's like challenging more than a mile or two But this I can like get like sweating and get out of breath And I'm not hurting my leg like it's not making it worse and with the way that the legs designed if I start like Getting a part of my socket that's bothering me or whatever from pushing down I can just focus on pulling up more which I think you're supposed to do for Viking anyways because there's that pin lock in there And it works really well, and it's just it's fantastic. It's so cool to be able to do if any of you are Peloton riders I'd love it if you pop your handles down below My favorite instructor is Cody. He's pretty fantastic, and I'm trying one of his rides today, but they always make me feel a little dead at the end They show up my rides. I'm First of all super out of breath, but secondly again like the getting out of the clips thing I got it on that side, but I had to do some thinking when it came to unclipping from this side So what I've been able to do is unclip from one side step behind myself, and then I have to like reach down and actually Maneuver this out of there because I can't do it with my own strength, and we are Done thank God I've been trying to do 30-minute rides lately instead of like the normal 20 that I was doing for like the first week or so and man It is it is a real challenge, but it's really cool. Oh, yeah My hair is looking hot so obviously after every ride I have to go through the process of like unscrewing my foot and re-screwing into the other socket But I'd say all in all it probably doesn't take any more than like two minutes Maybe I like to drink some water and then maybe snack on something and just stay still for a few minutes Breathe for a second. I am so thankful both to my friend Megan Thank You Moogan and also to Peloton for giving this to me It is it's a crazy gift and something I never expected to have and something I'm so grateful for because of how it helps me feel like I feel so Strong and capable and like my old self Whatever that is like it taps into something in me that is so necessary for me feeling okay And this was actually one of the reasons I was able to get off the pain medication that I've been on for almost a decade Because I was able to do something that I could like I could start really physically really pushing myself warming up my body Increasing blood flow and I find the more that I work out the less pain generally speaking I'm in and so having something that I could like really work out on was such a cool thing Such an important piece in this whole process now I just have to unscrew my leg re-screw my leg and go about my day But I think I'm just gonna sit here for a few minutes first But thank you so much for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me today I I don't know I felt really emotional about making this video for a long time because of what this ability means to me I would love to be able to ride an actual bike sometime in the near future like outside I used to ride my bike every day to work when I lived in Indiana And I went to school there and I worked there in the mornings So I'd get up at like 5 30 and just hop on my bike and bike through the cornfields of upland Indiana I have so many fond memories from that Brian really likes biking too So maybe eventually we'll buy some actual bikes and get out on some trails, but for now. This is absolutely perfect I'm so grateful for it a ginormous. Thank you goes out to all my patrons over on patreon. Thank you for what you're doing for me Thank you for supporting me. Thanks for being a part of this journey You help me more than you know and to you watching this video. I love you I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video after I get my leg off