Events at the 2024 Paralympics are winding down in Paris. Petra Luteran, University of Nebraska high jumper, lost the lower portion of her left arm in an ATV crash after graduating, but wanted to return to track and field. She found Jason Dean and his team at Limb Lab, a prosthetic and orthopedic company in Lincoln, to help her train and compete at a higher level. Nebraska Public Media’s Dale Johnson talked with Jason about how the company helps athletes.
Dale Johnson: You're trained as a prosthetic orthotist, not a track and field coach, Jason. So explain your role in Petra’s performances in Paris.
Jason Dean: My role is really, at the end of the day, just a super fan. I did do track and field all through college, not spectacular at it, never at a level that we get to see Petra perform, but once we had the opportunity to see where she wanted to go with this, we immediately saw some little things mechanically that we felt an activity specific device would benefit her. Not only in her training, but in her actual performance.
Johnson: I knew you did track and field in college. I’m curious how that's helping you help Petra?
Dean: I was a high jumper, triple jumper, I did long jump through high school. I was just a small Nebraska boy, so you kind of did everything. I immediately could see, just some imbalances throughout her fundamentals of the jump, which is a hitch kick. And just what you need to see, not only your lower extremity, but upper extremity. Your upper extremity is a big part of the jump. And we can see that with her being a lower limb amputee, that having something to help those mechanics would benefit her, and it has.
Johnson: Petra is competing in three events at the Paris Paralympics, the long jump, the 200 meter, the 400 meter, in which she finished fourth, by the way, but it was a personal best of 57.41. When you watched her run, Jason, what are you looking for with your trained eye that I can't see?
Dean: It really comes down to just the cadence and the gait cycle within the run. You know, we want to use our arms properly. It creates a lot of momentum. There's a lot of arm swing that helps within the running, as well as the jumping. So we can see, because we're training with the kinesiology and the gate training that we have you can just see those imbalances. They're obviously not something that everyone would pick out that, you know, in the times that I got to watch her train and run, we saw that pretty quickly. And then, you know, used use some different applications. You know, she was a University of Nebraska athlete. She's a position one high jumper for the Cornhuskers. And, you know, we got talking to some of them, and figured we could create a device that would help balance that out and help her train and help her run.
Johnson: What have you told Petra about using her arms, especially her shorter arm, for her approach and her jump?
Dean: Well, I don't tell her much. She's got a coach, which is also her dad. He's extremely good at it. She has a very strict regimen, the training regimen. You know, she ran her 400 and 30 minutes later, she was at the track training for her long jump. When I do talk of things, I specifically will point out what I think I see in arm drive once she was fit and using the prosthesis, she was able to generate a little more in the long jump. The very first time she put that on in the training side of things in Lincoln and in Omaha, she felt a noticeable difference right away. And I think she just built on that.
Johnson: Step back from all of this, specifically, Jason and talk about something that I observe, and that is that people witness. You said there were 70,000 people in the stands, most of them able bodied people. They witness these amazing skills performed by amputees using, in a lot of cases, high level prosthetics with with no way of realizing themselves, the assimilation that's necessary in order to create that intensity to perform. Could you explain it from a prosthesis perspective, please?
Dean: Yeah, it's unbelievable the technology and the differences in technology, and that's been fairly eye opening to me as I've been going from event to event facility to facility. And you see athletes from all over the world, and a lot of the technology they have, I look at and I'm kind of wondering why. You know, they're fit with things that we used a decade or more ago. And then you see some of the countries to where those athletes have the higher-end technology, and, you know, they have the running blades and the knees. There are a lot of misconceptions by able-bodied athletes and/or just people that, oh, they're bionic, and they're using this device, so they're going to be bigger, faster and stronger, and that is not the case. You look at Hunter Woodall, bilateral, below the knee. You look at Petra, you look at Ezra Frech who just won the 100 yard dash as a bilateral, excuse me as a unilateral. And the amount of energy and musculature and strength it requires to generate that type of performance is just remarkable, and the technology speaks to it quite a bit. And it's not something that's readily available to every amputee. You don't need to be a Paralympian to have a quality of life that allows you to exercise and run and jump and do sports and be active and exercise. But this technology allows not just Paralympians, but any of our clients, any of our users. It's just something that these guys, to perform at this level they need that, and it's a factor that they have to think about and weigh in on when it comes to performance.
Johnson: Jason Dean joining me, I'm Dale Johnson on Nebraska Public Media.