I’m a small-town guy from the Midwest. In late September of 2015, I was at a local race in Nashville, Illinois. I ended up having a really bad get-off. I ended up with a broken tib/fib and ended up slicing the artery behind my patella and ended up with compartment syndrome and pretty much all my complete blood vessel system from the knee down was completely destroyed.

There was just nothing left of it. They couldn’t do any cadaver veins or arteries. They tried that. Just nothing was working. It got to the point where the damage was just so severe that the only choice was an amputation.

So I didn’t really know what to do. I was just kind of laying in the ICU hospital bed and they were telling me what was going to happen. I didn’t really have a choice. I was sitting there with a destroyed leg. I couldn’t just get up and run away and just hide from it, I had to take it head on.

I thought I would never live a normal life, much less ride my dirtbike ever again. I never lost my will to want to get back on my dirt bike again. I told my family right away in the hospital that I’m going to get back on my bike. It’s going to happen. They were super pumped to see that I was back riding.

I was back riding I think a month and a half later. I was doing wheelies in my front yard without any kind of prosthetic leg on or anything. I was just going crazy not getting to ride because that’s who I am!

On my 1 year Death Cheater Day, I went back to the same track that I had my accident at EURO MX track and rode some laps during an open practice then went and did some fishing afterwards and everything went back to normal.

Whenever I got my prosthetic leg, I went to the motocross track and I just started riding, and riding, and riding. Got more comfortable. It was pretty much just like having to restart all over again. In my head I still knew how to ride and how the bike was going to work, but I had to make my body adjust to that prosthetic leg. It completely changed my riding style, and now I ride way far on the front of the bike.

I got hooked up with the Moto Knee and Versa Foot from the guy who won X Games Winter Gold, Mike Schultz. He created his own prosthetic with his company BioDapt. With that Moto Knee and Versa Foot setup, it’s way easier to distribute the weight on the right side and get a feel for everything. I can’t put my right foot out for right turns anymore. That was pretty much the hardest thing to get used to, was tight right-handed turns or just going into ruts for a right-handed turn.

Riding is so mental. Everybody who rides a dirt bike at a motocross track or any kind of riding at all knows how mental it is. They didn’t amputate my brain. They didn’t amputate my ability to ride my dirt bike. They just took an asset away from my riding. You can make up for loss of assets.

I'm an X Games Silver Medalist and AMA Adaptive Motocross Champion, a dream come true.