Utah amputee’s running legs returned after going missing on NYC train
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Photo Credit: KSL.com / Barb Woodhall
NEW YORK CITY — A double-amputee runner from Utah raced to find his running blades before a national track meet after the prosthetics went missing on a New York train.
Hunter Woodhall, a track star from Syracuse High School, is traveling on the East Coast for the National Junior Disability Championships in New Jersey. Sometime during an hour and a half ride from Stamford, Connecticut, to Grand Central Station in New York City on Saturday, his running blades went missing.
After four days of searching, Woodhall reported early Tuesday afternoon on Twitter that the prosthetics were turned in to law enforcement. He plans to pick them up at Grand Central Station.
The running blades were stored loose in an overhead compartment next to Woodhall’s suitcase during the train ride Saturday. He said when he went to grab his gear after helping an elderly couple off the train, only the suitcase remained. At first he didn’t think much of it because he thought the legs were in his suitcase.
“We left the train and were on the way to the hotel and we kind of figured out that, ‘holy cow, where are my legs?'” he said.
Grand Central Station was the last stop for the train, so it should have been cleaned after the Woodhalls got off. They went to the lost and found Monday, when it opened after the weekend, but didn’t have any luck locating the prosthetics at that time.
With Woodhall’s first race scheduled for Wednesday, he was worried the running blades wouldn’t be returned in time for him to compete. He also needs the prosthetics to train for his next event on Aug. 5, the Para Pan Am championships in Toronto, Canada.
It would have been difficult to try and make new prosthetics before the trip to Canada, because it is an expensive and time consuming process.
“It takes away valuable time for me to train and get used to the new blade, because anytime you get a new leg or prosthetic it’s going to be different and then you’re going to have to learn how to work with that,” he said. “You have to make something that is not a part of you become something that you can work with.”
Woodhall has been using prosthetics since he was 15 months old. As a freshman at Syracuse, he qualified for Utah’s state track meet.