I Thought I Would Never Walk Again, but Thanks to Bionic Legs—And My Own Resilience—I Just Completed the Final Mile of a Marathon

At 4 a.m. on a ranch in central Texas, the only light shining came from the stars, and two headlamps. Hannah Hutzley, wearing a pair of bionic legs, focused on putting one foot in front of the other. All she could see was contained in the three-foot halo of light emitted by her headlamp and the lamp of her companion, Tony Reyes. The rest was pitch black. But on the road to walking a mile—her first mile in six years—that light was enough to illuminate her path as she took it: one step at a time.

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In the almost total darkness, the mood was light. Hutzley walked with Reyes, her friend and BPN’s media director, who stabilized the walker Hutzley was using for support; it had been affixed with all-terrain tires to handle the dirt and gravel that made up the route. The headlamps attracted enormous Texas beetles, flying in Hutzley’s and Reyes’s faces. All they could do was laugh, and as they walked, they sang the refrain “I would walk 500 miles” over and over again. Every 20 steps or so, Hutzley would pause, before pushing forward once more.

Hutzley and Reyes were walking on the last mile of the BPN-sponsored Go One More Marathon. Their route started as a gradual uphill dirt road with a sharper incline halfway through. Then it leveled out until the end, where another steep incline made up the last tenth of a mile to the finish line.

At around just 0.2 or 0.3 miles into their one-mile trek, Hutzley’s right leg started to falter. She took breaks to catch her breath and ease the fatigue she was feeling in her hip flexors and the tingling in her feet, but kept going, joking, “This is a first—my legs hurt!”

Hutzley made it to the top of the incline, her halfway point, around 7 a.m. as the official race began and the sun rose.

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Hutzley says there was always a part of her that questioned the finality of her diagnosis.

“It became very apparent very quickly that [the doctors] were right, that I alone would never walk again,” Hutzley says. “But just on the back burner though, I just always felt like that wasn't the final say.”

A possibility presented itself in 2021. A member of her treatment team told Hutzley about a product called the C-Brace by prosthetics, orthotics, and exoskeleton maker Ottobock. It is a leg brace that contains smart hydraulics and a computerized knee joint that together allow for the leg to swing, the knee to bend and then to straighten, in time with and support of a person’s gait. It requires the wearer to have enough movement in their leg (or legs) to propel the brace forward, but it also allows for the person to bear weight on their legs, helping them bend their knees and make a walking motion.

Ottobock first developed the C-Brace for people with unilateral (single leg) paralysis because smart prosthetics are still such an up and coming area. “Nobody had experience in this field and we started conservatively,” says Ottobock global product manager Christof Küspert. Providing movement assistance for one leg is one challenge, but bearing the entirety of a person’s weight on a robotic structure is a whole other ball game. Hutzley was even told by her physio that the C-Brace wasn’t necessarily for people like her with bipedal paralysis—but they were both interested in what it could do. Hutzley went through a year of trying to qualify for the braces through insurance, and finally got them in June 2022.

Today, Hutzley is one of a small number of people with bipedal paralysis who are using the braces, which she does with the assistance of a walker since she wouldn’t be able to bear her weight and balance on the legs alone.

“I personally love to see the growing number of bilateral cases, who highly depend on safe devices to give back more freedom of mobility,” says Küspert

Hutzley’s progress in learning to use the brace to walk was slow. It took weeks to go from sitting to standing while wearing the braces. But when she did, Hutzley says the experience of bearing her weight on her legs “felt like coming home.”

As she began to take her first steps, Hutzley realized she wanted to do “something big.” It was taking her hours to walk around 200 steps, but at the suggestion of one of her physical therapists, an idea got lodged in her mind: one mile. She decided she wanted to walk a mile in the BPN “Go One More” race in April of the following year.

Reyes had witnessed Hutzley’s 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.