About two years ago, Jeff Glasbrenner was at the Kroger on Chenal Avenue in Little Rock with his children, Grace and Gavin, when an elderly woman approached them.
Glasbrenner is an amputee. He lost his right leg below the knee in a farming accident when he was 8. At the store that day, as he does on most days, he wore shorts and his prosthetic was visible.
Seeing Glasbrenner shopping with his children apparently stirred something in the woman.
"It's so good that you can get out," she said to him, kindly.
Glasbrenner smiles at the memory.
"I thought: 'You have no idea,'" he says at his west Little Rock home in a room filled with mementos of his accomplishments.
Glasbrenner, 47, is the first American amputee to summit Mount Everest; he played professional wheelchair basketball in Europe and won two world championships and a Paralympic Games bronze medal while playing the sport for the U.S. team. He has completed 25 Ironman Triathlons, is a two-time Half-Ironman World Champion and, along with reaching the top of Mount Everest, he has ascended the highest peaks on five continents and is aiming to bag the remaining two. Before the covid-19 pandemic scuttled his plans, he was preparing to ski to the North Pole.
But that's not all.
He was running the 2013 Boston Marathon when it was bombed. He was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and was featured on an episode of Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. He coached Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson on how to play an amputee in the 2018 film Skyscraper and, yes, he makes it to the grocery store with his kids on occasion.
"One of the reasons I do all of the fun stuff that I do is to change people's perception about what a person can and cannot do," he says.
NEW CHALLENGES
Spend some time with Glasbrenner and his positive, can-do attitude is obvious, which is not surprising since he is an athlete and motivational speaker.
He convinced his friend and fellow amputee, Andre Slay, to run the 2014 Boston Marathon, though Slay had never even run a 5K, much less a 26.2-mile marathon.
Slay, who lost his leg in a 2006 motorcycle wreck, was a ticket agent for Delta Airlines at Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport and often saw Glasbrenner there, coming and going from adventures or speaking engagements and struck up a friendship.
"I was like, 'What," Slay says with a laugh. "I don't run. I told him I could walk 26 miles. But he said, 'No, you have to compete.'"
This all seems to be of a piece with Glasbrenner's constant search for new challenges, even if -- or maybe especially if -- it involves something unfamiliar.
For instance: He'd never pushed himself in a wheelchair until his first wheelchair basketball practice in college. He met his wife, Elizabeth, at a 200-mile charity bicycle ride she organized in North Carolina where he was supposed to pedal a hand-cranked bike, which he had never done before. The first time he'd ever slept in a tent was on his first climbing expedition in 2015. A year later he was hauling himself up to the 29,029-foot summit of Everest.
"All of us strive for that comfort zone," Glasbrenner says, his Midwestern accent still intact 12 years after he and Elizabeth, a Little Rock native whom he married in 2008, settled here. "On Everest, there was the Death Zone. I would much rather live going toward that Death Zone than being stuck in the comfort zone. I want to push my limits and see how far I can go in anything I do."
Erik Schaffer is the founder and CEO of A Step Ahead Prosthetics, the Hicksville, N.Y.-based company that sponsors Glasbrenner and supplies him with the high-tech prosthetics he uses on his adventures.
"He is very humble and very charismatic and compassionate," Schaffer says. "He is also a pain in the ass because he always pushes me above and beyond where I think I can go."
FOURTEEN SURGERIES
Glasbrenner grew up with two younger brothers and two younger sisters on a farm in the small town of Boscobel, Wis.
His mother, Sandra, was a schoolteacher. His father, Jeffery Carroll Glasbrenner, worked at a John Deere dealership and also raised polled Hereford cattle.
Jeff was a constant companion with his dad on the farm, and one of his chores was helping cut hay. He would ride along as his father drove a John Deere 60 tractor and operated a sickle mower.
When the mower was clogged, Jeff's father would shut it off and Jeff would hop down from the tractor to free the blade of the clumps of alfalfa and other detritus.
On the morning of July 30, 1980, Jeff was on his perch on the tractor when the mower blade hit a rock and came grinding to a halt. He jumped down and pulled away the rock and was about to get back on the tractor when his father started the machine and Jeff's pant leg was sucked into the blade.
"I remember laying on the ground and looking down at my leg and seeing the bones sticking out," he says at his home last month in west Little Rock. "My shoe was 10 feet away with my foot still in it."
His father applied a tourniquet in the field and rushed him to the Boscobel hospital.
Glasbrenner was moved to the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison where he spent 47 days and underwent 14 surgeries.
The elder Glasbrenner, who died in 2010, was taciturn and not comfortable sharing his emotions.
"I always wanted to talk to him about that day because I know he felt a lot of guilt, but he would never talk about it," Glasbrenner says.
After his father was diagnosed with lung cancer, the younger Glasbrenner took him on a bucket-list trip to Colorado, where he asked him about the day of the accident.
"He said, 'I know you had to go through a lot, and I'm sorry. But I'm proud of you.' That's all he ever said."
INDEPENDENCE
When Glasbrenner finally left the hospital he was given a list of things he was forbidden to do, including playing sports.
A piece of advice from the mother of a young cancer patient at the hospital helped his parents set a course for their newly disabled son.
"She said that the biggest enemy of a kid with a disability is their parents," he says. "They can either do everything for their child, or they can choose to let them be independent."
The Glasbrenners chose the latter, but it wasn't easy.
"Mom said she would go in her room every night and cry," Glasbrenner says. "She wanted to open doors for me, she wanted to get me a Coke. She wanted to make life easier for me, but she knew she had to let me figure out how to live on my own."
His parents' plight was something he didn't completely grasp until he and Elizabeth became parents.
Grace, their daughter, is 14 and was born with mosaic tetrasomy 5p, an extremely rare chromosomal anomaly syndrome that causes her to have dozens of seizures a day.
"There will be times when she will fall and hit her head, or fall and scrape something. You feel guilty about that," he says. "You want the best for your kid, you want to protect them. We're doing everything we can. We have tried lots of different medicines, and we even moved to Colorado for treatment, but there are not a lot of options. We just embrace every single day."
WHEELCHAIR BASKETBALL
Growing up in small-town Wisconsin, Glasbrenner was the only disabled kid in his class. (He still has his first prosthetic, which looks positively crude compared to the lineup of high-tech, carbon-fiber limbs he uses now).
"I wanted to fit in in the worst way and be like everybody else," he says.
He stayed away from sports and instead cheered for his younger sister and best friend, Jenelle.
"She was the best athlete in the school, male or female," he says. "I would go watch her play and sit on the sidelines. That was kind of hard. I was so proud of her, but I also thought that maybe I could do something like that."
His chance to play sports finally came in college at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, when a fellow amputee told him to try out for the wheelchair basketball team.
Never mind that the last time he'd been in a wheelchair was when he was being rolled out of the hospital at age 8.
When the sport didn't come naturally he was dejected, but he would get up early -- like, 5 a.m. early -- to work with head coach Mike Frogley.
"He took me under his wing," Glasbrenner says. "All of a sudden this guy is telling me: 'You can determine how far you want to go.' He provided the blueprint, and I provided the effort."
In 1997, he qualified for the U.S. National Team and won a gold medal with the team at the 1998 World Championships in Australia, defeating the Netherlands, 68-52.
After college, Glasbrenner sold sport-based wheelchairs for a medical sales company in North Carolina but used up all of his vacation time within the first few months traveling to wheelchair basketball games.
"I had a choice. Do I go all in and get really good at wheelchair basketball, or do I do the 9-5," he says.
He chose the former.
He won a bronze medal at the 2000 Paralympic games in Sydney; played for the Arkansas Rolling Razorbacks; professional teams in Spain and Italy; and for the Denver Nuggets and Dallas Mavericks of the National Wheelchair Basketball Association. He still holds the record for most points scored in a game -- 63, in the 2004 National Wheelchair Basketball Championship -- and in March was inducted into the NWBA Hall of Fame.
Glasbrenner started competing in triathlon and finished his first Ironman Triathlon -- a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile marathon -- in 2006. He has completed 25 so far.
Slay, who is now a pilot for United Airlines, was insecure about his prosthetic and not physically active when Glasbrenner pitched him on the idea of running the 2014 Boston Marathon the year after the deadly bombing.
"When he met me, I was pretty out of shape and not confident," Slay says.
Glasbrenner guided him through training for a qualifying marathon in Colorado that he needed to run before Boston and helped him get a special prosthesis for running.
They finished the Boston Marathon together with another runner, Chris Madison.
"He carried us," Slay says. "I struggled with prosthetic issues, but Jeff got us through. He is so selfless."
Slay eventually became a sprinter, running the 100- and 200-meters and also doing the long jump. He came up just short in qualifying for the U.S. team at the 2016 Paralympic trials.
"That all started because Jeff told me to take a chance," he says. "And you can't tell him you quit. You just can't."
SEVEN SUMMITS
In 2015, Glasbrenner and Grace attended an event held by Paradox Sport, a Colorado-based company that leads children with disabilities on rock-climbing trips. Grace climbed for two hours and didn't have a seizure.
"That was amazing," he says. "It was like a little slice of heaven."
Afterward, Glasbrenner was asked if he would be interested in climbing Grand Teton in Wyoming.
He had no mountaineering experience and the climb was a technical challenge. Do you think he said no?
Ha!
"I'd never climbed or hiked or any of that stuff," he says. "But I loved it. I loved learning something new and being part of a team, and getting to the summit was so cool."
Two months later, he joined a group that climbed Aconcagua, a peak in the Andes mountains that at 22,838 feet is the highest point in the Western Hemisphere.
"I knew then that I wanted to climb the Seven Summits," he says, referring to the highest mountains on each continent.
For his Everest trip, he was part of a team led by veteran Seattle-based guide Garrett Madison, who sent him to a climb in Ecuador as a sort of test.
"I didn't want to be just another person who paid a large sum of money to go," Glasbrenner says. "I wanted to prove my worth."
He was helped financially by his sponsors, Lincoln Financial Group and A Step Ahead Prosthetics.
A special prosthetic had to be built for the extreme conditions on Everest.
"The amount of prototyping we did for the Everest leg was probably beyond six figures," Schaffer says. "There was a lot of trial and error."
Climbing with a prosthesis takes some adjustment, and one misstep on the side of a mountain could be fatal.
"I have to admit that I do have limitations," Glasbrenner says. "Balance is one of them ... I can't feel my foot. I have to look down and make sure it's planted."
Imagine doing that on a narrow ridgeline with a 10,000-foot drop on each side and other climbers coming down from the top of the mountain.
He also lost 20 pounds from his 6-foot, 2-inch, 176-pound frame during the assault on Everest, which affected the way his prosthetic fit onto his leg.
"I had 20 different socks on my stump. But it was still really loose and sloppy, and it became even more of a challenge," he says.
On May 19, 2016, Glasbrenner stood at the top of the world and savored the view where, on a clear day, one can see for miles.
"There were so many people that helped me get there," he says. "Elizabeth, my family, my coach and mentors."
He stayed for 25 minutes before descending.
A FEW EXTRA LEGS
"No matter what you do, there is always something else to come along," Glasbrenner says when asked if he had anything left to accomplish.
He plans to continue his assault on the Seven Summits (he and 12-year-old Gavin climbed Mount Kosciuszko in Australia together), with Carstensz Pyramid on the island of New Guinea and Alaska's Denali the final two on his list.
And he is still eyeing a skiing trek to the North Pole (he has already visited the South Pole when he climbed Mount Vinson, Antarctica's highest point, in 2018. "Imagine being in a bathtub filled with ice and staring at a blank piece of paper," is how he describes Antarctica).
With his plans for this year's adventures were derailed, Glasbrenner on a different quest.
"I've turned into a schoolteacher. I've gotten to spend a lot of time with the kiddos, even more than I normally do. Gavin loves fishing, and we've been doing a lot of that."
He is also happy to talk about his life and show just what a person can achieve.
"It's cool to be able to tell my story and hopefully motivate people along the way. Especially during these times of covid-19."
He gestures to his collection of prosthetics.
"A lot of people think about what they don't have," he says. "I never think about missing my leg. The way I see it, I've got a few extra legs."