Hannah Hutzley was paralyzed from the waist down at age 19.
At 23, she took her second first steps.
Now, she has used bionic legs to walk a mile of a marathon.
The rest was pitch black.
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In the almost total darkness, the mood was light.
The headlamps attracted enormous Texas beetles, flying in Hutzleys and Reyess faces.
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Every 20 steps or so, Hutzley would pause, before pushing forward once more.
Their route started as a gradual uphill dirt road with a sharper incline halfway through.
At around just 0.2 or 0.3 miles into their one-mile trek, Hutzleys right leg started to falter.
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Hutzley says there was always a part of her that questioned the finality of her diagnosis.
But just on the back burner though, I just always felt like that wasn’t the final say.
A possibility presented itself in 2021.
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Nobody had experience in this field and we started conservatively, says Ottobock global product manager Christof Kuspert.
It took weeks to go from sitting to standing while wearing the braces.
As she began to take her first steps, Hutzley realized she wanted to do something big.
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Reyes had witnessed Hutzleys early attempts with the C-Brace.
So when he got the call that she wanted to do a mile, he felt conflicted.
He knew that training would be intense, and that completing the challenge was not a given.
The endeavor could open Hutzley up to both injury and disappointment.
But that feeling quickly gave way to supporting her determination.
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