When Kyle Bryant was a kid, he grew up in California, kind of like your everyday kid, running around, playing with all of his friends, super active, athletic, outdoors all the time.
His whole family was.
And then in his late teens, something started to change.
He noticed that he was struggling with his stability and balance and strength to a certain extent.
And normally a super active kid and an athlete, he was starting to sort of see declines in his performance that nobody could really explain.
That led to a whole bunch of questions, a whole bunch of medical professionals being in the mix, and eventually a diagnosis of something called Friedrich's ataxia, or fa for short, which is a neuromuscular condition that is progressive in nature, and as of now at least, there's no treatment or cure for it.
He was about 17 when he got that, and he had to make some decisions about what he would do with his life, about how he would define himself and the expectations he had for that moment forward and the choices that he would make and the actions that he would take.
And that led to him actually going to college and then discovering in a moment, cycling, actually using a specially developed tricycle.
And that profoundly changed his life and set him on a path to become not just what I would describe as an ultra endurance athlete, but really somebody who was on a mission with a stronger, bigger sense of purpose, to shine the light on what he was capable of on this condition, and also to shine the bigger light on how we all define ourselves as able bodied or disabled, and what that even means in the context of our sense of possibility and how we choose to live each day.
His entire journey is also detailed in a really moving new memoir called shifting into high gear, and we explore a lot of the really powerful moments along this journey in today's conversation.
Super excited to share it with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
I was born in Auburn, California, and I grew up in the foothills in California grass Valley.
I went to school, you know, elementary school, high school out there, and I went to college at UC Davis, right near Sacramento.
And I owned a home in Sacramento for a little while after college.
So.
Yeah.
And it sounds like you were also, like you and your whole family, I guess, were just super active, super outdoorsy.
Yeah.
Yeah.