In the picture are the kids from Norex all wearing Who Says I Can’t logo gear!

Please visit: http://224workouts.com/2012/02/02/who-says-i-cant/

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.
— Steve Martin, comedian

It is quite an ordeal getting a book out into print and into people’s hands. But this one really had some extra special twists, turns, bumps and detours along the way! It all began in about 2003 with people who heard my anecdotes and stories and advice telling me I needed to write this stuff down. So, back in the very early days of blogs, using Google’s blogspot free blogging service, I started to do just that. The blog posts were really long for a blog–they each had a major theme and were more like chapters. From the start I wanted my writing not to be a cancer or disability blog–I wanted this to be valuable to a lot more people than just that. I had realized the common themes between what I had had to deal with and how I dealt with it and all kinds of hardships others go through. After a while this collection of blog post vignettes looked more and more like a book. I had written two technical books up to this point so I knew what the process entailed–at least with a technical book and a publisher signed on from the start. I liked the process, I liked getting something I had written into the final form of a beautiful book, and I enjoyed the feedback I got from getting a book published. Besides, once again, it’s a challenge a rare few attempt so as always, that appealed to me.

It was Arthur Graham, my prosthetist, who had been following my blog, who said “This is a book! And you need to publish it so I can give it to my patients.” That was a pretty strong affirmation of the content I had in the blog posts so far and it was all the encouragement I needed to get started. What helped was that right at this time in 2005 I was signing up for the one-year assignment at Petabric in Portland, OR which meant a lot of flying time and a lot of alone time in an apartment across the country from Carole every other weekend. Something all consuming like writing this book would be a perfect antidote to the dead time and loneliness of being there on my own.

Whether on the plane (in first class thanks to Delta frequent flyer upgrades) or in the sparse second floor apartment with a view only of other apartment buildings, I always wrote to loud “concentrate” music particularly my new favorites of the time of Aria, Delerium and Lisa Gerrard. I had the original ideas in the blogs but I was just using them now as reference material. I wrote on yellow pads. As high tech as I am about most things, I still prefer to do original writing in long hand until I have a full chapter on paper. Then I do the first pass edit also on paper before I type anything into a word processor. I would totally lose myself in the writing not noticing that six hours had gone by and I would suddenly realize I had not gotten up to pee, eat, or drink. I started to find the writing very cathartic. The peace and quiet—and frankly, the solitude and loneliness—enabled me to dig deep in the dusty vaults of my memory and experiences of over 35 years and pull out details, stories, experiences, and insights that would be helpful to readers. I was spilling my guts. Some of what I was writing was deviating a lot from my goals but I let myself go precisely because it was proving to be so cathartic. But, I was writing too much about bad experiences. Luckily, the multi-pass editing process went from a personally cathartic book to a generally useful (and hopefully much more interesting) book.

From the middle of 2005 until about the end of my one-year assignment in Oregon I was writing, editing, tuning, typing, editing more, and constantly filling in details and messages to get the whole package as good as I could get it. In mid 2006 I started to think about a publisher. I checked but none of the technical publishers who had published How Debuggers Work or much more recently, Securing Web Services with WS_Security would touch a book like this. I was in the memoir category and neither J. Wiley & Sons nor SAMS dealt with those and didn’t have a sister house that did either. So next step was to see about finding a publisher directly by myself. That was a quick exercise which immediately determined one does not, under any circumstances, as an individual author go directly to a publisher. They only want to deal with literary agents, period. In many cases the point was made emphatically as in “if you send us submissions we will discard it with a snow shovel out into the back dumpster.” I’m not kidding. I was learning a whole new industry and like any industry it certainly has it quirks. Ok got it. So on to finding a literary agent.

Naturally, I used the Web to search for literary agents. There are nice sites that list all known literary agents and I found the one of those that seemed the most thorough, easy to use, and up to date. Here you could filter down to agents that cared about memoirs and were still taking in new clients. There were 58 that passed through that filter. Each one had very specific, and very different requirements for how to send them a “query” to ask them to represent you. Some wanted only email some said never send me email. Some wanted just a synopsis, others wanted a full sample chapter. I listed out the 58 distinct sets of requirements and followed them all to a T. Out when 58 packages requesting a literary agent. I don’t pray but if I did I would have then. I just waited. Ultimately I got 57 responses. One didn’t even bother to respond. All 57 that did rejected my request. The responses were all over the map.
“The world doesn’t need another cancer book.”
“The writing is not good enough.”
“The story is not that compelling.”
“Thanks but this is not for me.”
And the most common was just, “Thanks but no thanks. And good luck.” By the way, they all ended with good luck. That way of saying good luck really is “go away, don’t bother me, I hope to never see or hear from you again.”

I am resilient but I hate rejection. It slowed me down from dating in the early days. And it’s why I could never really do sales at any of my companies. Sales people have really thick skin and deal with rejection as a standard part of their everyday work life. So this much rejection was a real setback for me and I decided to put myself in a time out. I put the whole idea of publishing this on the shelf for a while. I knew I just needed some time to think of a new approach–I was not giving up by any stretch of the imagination. It really is true that the brain keeps working on a gnarly problem even if we don’t focus our frontal lobe on it. When on a long training bike ride I also tend to think pretty deeply about things that are “on my mind.” It was on such a ride that I had a Homer Simpson Duh! moment.

I know from lots of experience that who you know and connections you can make through people you know can make all the difference in life, in business, in what ever. So why I took the hard route on literary agent I will never know. But I realized that I knew someone who had an agent and they should be the focus of my inquiries not 58 complete strangers. Dan Kinlon had been the co-speaker to the Topsfield High boys several years previously but then he had written a book where a chapter had featured me. This was plenty of “in” to proceed so I made my pitch to Dan. He was not completely blown away saying that it would be a hard sell to get an agent much less a publisher interested. But sure, he would introduce me to his agent as long as my expectations were low because Kenny would probably not agree to take me on. I spoke to Kenny Wapner right away and while he too was skeptical at first he asked me to send him the manuscript. I did and the next day he called back and introduced himself as my new agent.

Kenny liked my story and my writing. He thought the world could use a book like mine, that it was different, and he especially liked the fact that I was not someone famous which made the story, and its approachability, even more compelling. However, what neither of us knew at the time was how much that same facet would work against us in the book publishing business. As much as he liked what he saw, he still said it needed his expert “book doctoring” to make it acceptable. And that was going to cost $10,000. An agent takes a cut of the ultimate deal they can get so they never charge up front. But Kenny was wearing two hats and his book doctor hat did have a fee. I had the money but its never easy parting with that much of it. I wanted this to be perfect so I finally agreed. He started to do major surgery. He turned chapters two, three and four into a new chapter one. He deleted a chapter or two and changed the emphasis. He wanted much more of a focus on amputees thinking that would make it original and unique.

Once the book doctoring was complete–a process which took two months–we moved to the book proposal process. A book proposal looks to me just like a business plan for a new startup. It includes the niche this book is going to fill, what books it will compete against, the credentials of the author, a sample of the writing and a full marketing plan for how the author will work tirelessly to make sure the book is a success. This proposal, including all of chapter one, ended up being a 62-page tome and took us another two months to complete. Now Kenny felt he could start to approach the huge trade publishers; we both felt they were who we needed to try to get interested in this book.

The trade publishers demand an exclusive so Kenny had to work them serially. None of them seemed in a hurry to respond to his inquiry so the process was excruciatingly slow and painful. Week after week he would say, “Well so-and-so has our inquiry and is considering it and I have to wait long enough for them to give us an answer.” But eventually the answer from each one was the same. He would hear “We like the story. We like the author. We like the writing. But he doesn’t have enough of a platform so we can’t move forward with this. Good luck.”
There was that frigging good luck again. I asked Kenny, “So what do they mean by a platform?” Kenny’s response was that a platform is when someone is either a national politician, an olympic athlete, or a famous actor. “But you said the whole attraction of my story is precisely that I am not famous,” I said. “It defeats the whole point of this story being approachable by everyone if I am not an everyman they can identify with.”

“I know,” he would say. “We have to move on to the next one and see if they have a different reaction.” But they never did. Publisher after publisher all said the same thing: not enough of a platform. Sarah Palin, with all her idiotic proclamations and scary politics while Tina Fey constantly skewered her definitely had a platform and could sell 500,000 copies of her book in short order but we could not get a publisher to give us the time of day.

For a solid year Kenny patiently worked Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and so on down the list getting the same answer in every case: you need more of a platform. So how was I supposed to get a platform? I was not going to suddenly become famous. Kenny could tell I’d had enough of this strategy and wanted to try something else. He said it before I asked: “You know,” he said, “I originally told you self-publishing was a dead end…and it was. But times have changed and successful self-published books do get discovered and picked up by traditional publishers. Maybe that is the best option now.”

It was 2009 and I had been trying to get this book in people’s hands for five years and was seemingly no closer. I agreed with Kenny’s new-found support for self-publishing; I just wanted to get the book out there after all this time. Kenny and I parted ways after a long, intense publishing tour of duty together.

I set off to learn about the self-publishing business as if it was a new market I was building a startup in. And like most startups, first I had to make a mistake or two. I got sucked in by Lulu.com who has alluring positioning, marketing and web site. It’s great if you have a cookbook you want to publish for all your friends but they have no business with someone who wants to really put out a quality book and wants professional editing and cover design. I realized all this in time to get out of any contract and before any books were produced. I went back to the Web and started looking carefully for people’s recommendations and finally got the list down to four or five finally choosing Mill City Press. With professional editing, cover design, a Web site for sales, and real distribution, this felt right but I would have to pay for it. This was going to run $5,000. Mill City evaluated the manuscript and immediately suggested it go through an imprint of theirs called Bascom Hill Books that looks to the outside world like a small publisher not like a self-publisher which is supposed to help.

The cover design and editing processes were fun and successful. Just before the cover was final I sent the final manuscript to Jonathan Alter at Newsweek. He was a friend and a professional writer as well as a cancer survivor. It was a long shot but I asked him for an endorsement we could print on the back cover. He read it over the weekend and called me first thing Monday morning. I expected a polite brush off. But instead he said it was fantastic and he would be thrilled to write me a blurb. What he wrote was incredible:

Jothy Rosenberg is not a celebrity but an Everyman, which gives his wrenching story of astonishing grit its inspirational power. After being told when he was 19 that he had no chance of surviving the cancer that had already cost him one leg and one lung, Jothy made a decision. He would ski until he died. Instead he became one of the first beneficiaries of then-primitive chemotherapy, a champion one-legged, one-lunged skier, swimmer and cyclist, and an early model of how to triumph over cancer and disability. For anyone trying to turn a cancer diagnosis, major disability, or even a major life challenge into a character-building experience, this well-written book is indispensable.

As we got to the end of 2009 it was finally coming to fruition: the book would be in print and available to the world as of December. I was beside myself. This felt so good. I organized a book launch event in the offices of the PMC that was so tied to this book.

I was nervous as it first came out as to what the reaction would be. But people said it was really well written. I even heard people say they couldn’t put it down, something an author just dies to hear! Other comments were placed in the reader review area on Amazon such as these:

This book has helped me to realize that in life, when we are pushed hard and life throws us curve balls, how we react defines us. In choosing to fight back and overcome we set the stage for anything to be possible. This book was a pleasurable read throughout and an important reminder that we have this choice in so many circumstances in life. Jothy’s never give up attitude is a model of how we should all strive to push ourselves to our limits each and every day.

This book was both an inspiring and a painful reminder of what life can throw at us. Jothy provides us with a great role model of what one person can do to both overcome their personal struggles and — even more important help a broad community. I think this book should be required reading.

“Who Says I Can’t” is a powerful story told well by author Jothy Rosenberg. This book falls into my “couldn’t put it down” category and I have gifted it to at least 6 friends who have all thoroughly enjoyed it. Jothy’s positive attitude and determination are inspirational not just to those who have faced life-threatening illness but to anyone facing daunting situation. Read this book and the next time you are faced with difficulty you will find yourself thinking, “who says I can’t?”

Not a day passes when I don’t think of this book and Jothy’s life story. Every time I think there’s nothing to do or do better, in the good life, there always, always is.

I turned to getting the book out in other formats. I have worked in technology long enough, and I myself am a heavy user of all things technology, so I knew this needed to be out in ebook format as well as in audiobook format. My publisher was too small and of limited means to handle these so I was on my own.

Since the Kindle was the first of the ebook readers Amazon seemed like a good place to start. And they do have resources for the self-publisher. They have a tool to take a book in PDF and convert it automatically into Kindle format and they have a simulator that pretends it is a Kindle in your browser so you can test and see how your book will look when someone buys it. Their tool should not ever have been released. It made my book look horrible. OK so next I used Amazon to look for a book on how to do this and I found one. It made the point that this was tricky stuff. Indeed, it is. Each book reader has a different format. Each of them is really acting like a browser and uses the same basic language called HTML but a different dialect of it. They all support choices of text size so they have to “flow” the text from page to page depending on how much of the chosen text size fits on a single page. The hardest part was the beginning of each chapter where there is a picture and some quotations. But even the running text needed careful scrutiny. You cannot, for example, just use quotation symbols like “. They distinguish between left double quote and right double quote. And they use the obscure HTML codes to do so which are ‘“’ and ‘“’. If you use the standard punctuation mark it will show up on the Kindle as a big ugly splotch mark. And because my book manuscript did just use the “ symbol I couldn’t just do a global substitute; I had to manually go in and change each one. In the end I got it to look good on the Kindle, Nook and iPad.

Next up was an audiobook format. I read that the fastest growing part of publishing was audio books. I also read that the author who narrates his book himself has an idiot for a narrator. They all said narrating is basically acting and someone with acting training had to be reading. So I shopped around. Boy was this going to be another huge expense. I was already $15,000 in the hole for this book and it looked like another $6,000 for this next format if I used a pro. So I proceeded and had John Farrell read all eleven hours of it. That audiobook is 455 megabytes in size. Amazon’s Audible book store sells it but very few have ever been sold.

In general sales were slow. Viral is a word everyone likes to throw around but a minimal starting point is necessary for something to “go viral” on the Internet. Little pockets would take off. A small rabid following kept buying more and more copies that they gave to their circle of friends but that still did not ignite self-sustaining sales. I was continuously over-optimistic thinking the next thing I did would make sales take off big time. I pushed Barnes & Noble for a book signing. I had to push and push. They probably agreed just to get me to stop calling. They let me do a week-day evening event in the largest Boston area B&N store in Burlington, Massachusetts. Most of the people there were my friends and family. By the end of two years a total of 3,000 copies had sold. That is considered pretty good for a self-published book but no where near what I had hoped given how many people could really benefit from it.

Next up, I’d like to talk about some of my experiences trying to get more opportunities to speak publicly.

“The newly disabled, those diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses, and those who have suffered a tremendous loss, need time within themselves to recover psychologically. That kind of self-centeredness is crucial in order to reclaim your life. If you don’t focus on yourself, you may not find the inner strength you need to fight back.

“I was going to Alta to be a ski bum and to ski an entire season so I could be a great skier. Period. Little things, like my parents’ feelings, lack of snow, no job waiting, or a finite amount of money to spend, were incidental to my goal. It’s not as if I was obsessing over the prospect of dying. I really didn’t dwell on it. I didn’t bemoan my fate, lash out, or become frozen in either fear or self-pity. It moved to the background, but it underlined everything I did. I became even more of a risk-taker. I became much more driven and determined in what I wanted to accomplish. I felt a sense of urgency about everything. “Hurry up and live” could have been my motto. My focus and drive made me seem selfish. Years later, I learned to soften the edges on that as I felt the death sentence lift but I have no doubt it permanently affected my personality and behavior. “

This kept on for years. Find a sport, focus on it, work hard to get good at it, accomplish that, get recognition. Confidence then grows little by little. But inevitably, something, even a small thing would happen and you would crash. That might be a problem with the “equipment” we need to move through the world, or it might be an injury to the remaining part of our bodies that we tend to work too hard, or it might even be a sudden onset of feeling like a cripple because something mundane suddenly feels really hard to do. This crash required going back to the thing that helped you feel good again. This cycle requires a high degree of inward focus to keep the drive going and keep fighting the challenges.

Skiing was a lot of hard work every season but I was highly motivated to get out and do it no matter how hard it was to get my single leg strong enough. Skiing was a place where staring was for the right reason and the more accomplished a skier the observer was, the more acknowledgement and respect came my way. It was like a drug. Swimming Alcatraz was similar. It became an annual pilgrimage to get that elixir I would get from people who would huddle around me on the ferry boat out to the island to learn from me how it was done. Never ever did I become complacent about that simple statement: they were respecting my ability, a person with a significant disability, to do the swim and in many cases knew or assumed they would not be able to do the swim as fast as me.

Later in life, all of this still occurs but the complete and total inward focus changed to allow me to instead focus on and help others more genuinely and sincerely. I realized that to truly help others I needed to get a good reputation for the book, for my speaking, for my TV show, for the media spots and so on. The message is strong and Who Says I Can’t can and will help a lot of people to get off their butts, stop whining, and just start trying again. But lots of people need to see this message and that requires a strong branding effort and a lot of work.

This has become a new form of self-focus because it is requiring self-branding. Like a Nike trying to take over a little spot in the general public’s minds such that the spotting of just their “swoosh” symbol would elicit “that’s Nike” in their minds, albeit in a smaller way, I needed to work towards getting a spot in people’s minds. I had to develop what the marketing people called “positioning” that would allow me to form a strong association with a concept in people’s minds. My brand was Who Says I Can’t but it was also me and I had to keep them tightly coupled to pull this off. Establishing a positioning is really hard. There are a lot of people who have to see your brand and they have to see it a lot and like it for it to work its way into the precious few places people reserve in their minds for positionings.

Occasionally my self-branding went to far and those closest to me, like my adult daughter, would get really mad at me because to her it seemed like I was being way too self-focused or self-absorbed or even selfish. I never wanted that to be what it was or how it appeared to anyone especially my family. Like many things it had to be a balance. She and everyone really did want to have my work continue and for me to have success with this book and all its derivatives. I think with one’s family special care needs to be taken because they are getting such a high dose of what everyone else is getting in very small quantity. For me, what I have had to learn is to work very hard to minimize the exposure those closest to me have to this self-branding process but to still allow them to participate. Like anything important it will require balance and constant vigilance. But it will be worth it in the end when thousands of people who face the challenges of life stop saying I CAN’T and start saying WHO SAYS I CAN’T!

On September 2nd I visited Gayle King (Oprah’s BFF) for a chat on her radio show on Oprah’s Sirius/XM network. Anyone who has listened to Gayle’s show knows she is funny, brash, exuberant. She loved to say the name of the book over and over and made a point of saying WHO…SAYS…I…CAN’T very slowly with each word practically shouted into the microphone each time. She had read the book very carefully and from her notes highlighted some incredibly detailed things. She knew my wife’s name, my dog’s name and the name of my first date. Or attempted date.

She knows how to put someone right at ease. She made it a lot of fun. I had a T-shirt for her and had estimated from pictures and stats on her I gleaned from the web that she would need a medium. Just to be safe I also brought a large. One web site said she was 5’8″ and others said 5’10″. The correct answer is 5’10″. When she looked at the medium she said that was way too optimistic since she had just gone on vacation and put on a few extra pounds. She blurted out how much she actually weighs which is the absolute first in my life that a woman has done that. (No I will not repeat what she said here for all the world to know.) Needless to say, she grabbed the large for herself and planned to give the medium away to someone else.

The interview is archived on her site for posterity here: Gayle talks with Jothy Rosenberg

I am not responsible for the title on the page. I have tried to get her folks to fix the obvious mistyping but to no avail. It was supposed to be one segment but either there just was no one else for her to interview that day or she really liked talking to me and ended up taking two of her standard segments.

Now if all this nice publicity could just turn into a network deal for the TV show we could start telling more than my story but tell the even more interesting and more amazing stories of hundreds of really cool people out there. Let me get started on that!

My partner in the TV venture, Steve McCarthy, is a long time independent producer. In his many years in the TV business he has worked on Americas Most Wanted, 60 Minutes, and for The Today Show among many others. It was for a 2007 segment of the Today Show with Jonathan Alter that Steve and I first met. Jonathan had written a cover story about his own very personal battle with cancer for Newsweek and I felt compelled to write back to the magazine about that. I never do that but what I said had some impact and Jonathan wrote back that he would be doing a TV segment on me based on that letter, my wife got a good laugh out of that email. But as the weeks went by it started to sound serious. Jonathan got plugged into the whole PMC scene and, shockingly, was signed up to ride the first 80+ mile day. A couple weeks before the ride, the producer of the segment, the one and the same Steve McCarthy, made arrangements to arrive at our house for filming the day before the big ride. Suddenly Carole was not laughing and started cleaning. I remarked to her that they rarely film behind people’s sofas. And then she realized that maybe she should not go to work that day and should stay home to monitor and supervise things. Things went really well and in fact, with no advance warning, they decided to interview Carole for the segment and her interview was probably the highlight of the whole piece. That aired in October 2007.

Flash forward to 2011 and now Steve and I are business partners working hard on Who Says I Can’t the reality TV series. As we got started with the detailed planning and financing for the show’s pilot, Steve mentioned the concept to his old boss Jim Bell over at Today. This was normal as Steve naturally keeps testing the concept with TV people to validate and to begin to spread the word. Jim didn’t just like the concept, he committed on the spot to sending a crew of three up to Boston to film us while we filmed for the pilot. This happened in mid April when we would finally have warm enough weather to get out in sailboats with our first athlete, paraolympic gold medalist Maureen McKinnon.

Our crew arrived. With Steve was Koontz and Bruce and Jenn. They would get some background footage of Maureen at home with her kids. Meanwhile the interviewer Sara Haines and her producer Durrell Dawson went straight to my house to setup. Their third member met me at Underwood Elementary School in Newton where for the 12th time that school year I was presenting an Understanding Our Differences talk to the fifth graders and Rebecca from the Today show wanted to capture this scene. In fact this was how their segment ended up opening right as I took my leg off to let the kids play with it while I challenged them to a lone-legged rope jumping contest.

Afterwards Rebecca and I had to race back to my house for the interview with Sara. For mid April, it was darn nice so we set up outside for the chat. My young dog made sure she got on camera too. And why not being a beautiful blond herself? The main point of the interview was to get on camera why I wrote the book and then why turn that into a reality TV show. No sooner had we finished what Sara wanted to get then she was off to get back to NYC for her next thing. Oh the life of a national TV interviewer! But Durrell remained behind for the next day when we started filming was what he was really after. For me filming actually began that night and I ran up to Marblehead to Maureen’s house to begin the back story interview so audiences really get up close and personal with her.

Next day was clear, sunny, breezy and crisp. A perfect day for a sailing race on Boston Harbor. This time the camera guys had to be with us on the boats. We did a brief interview on the dock and then I was going to get a chance to familiarize myself with a boat I had never seen before. We went out for a little spin just so when I was racing Ms Olympic gold I might have a chance not to embarrass myself. It’s a bit bigger than my family sailboat but once I got the feel for it’s responsiveness and how the sail mechanics worked, everything else fell back to sailing fundamentals that I had learned as a kid. So now it was time for the “race”. Maureen had one crew and a cameraman in her boat and me likewise. A motorized chase boat would have our third camera and Durrell from NBC. The camera guy in each boat had to lie flat in the bottom to be invisible but could get cool shots of the sailer from below.

Maureen thought this would be child’s play–after all I sail no where near the olympic level. But I am incorrigibly competitive and was determined to make a good showing for myself so I really want for it. It was a short course and heading to the final mark she realized I was ahead of her and my “crew”, Bobby, was an All-American collegiate racer and he wanted to win as well. So we did some aggressive maneuvers and cut her off or tried to force her into the pier so she would have to fall off. But Olympic training is not form naught and out of nowhere she pulled some magic move out of a hat and inched ahead of me and beat me to the mark by one foot. The whole thing was well recorded by 4 cameras including by Durrell from NBC!

We all came in to the dock and put the boats away quickly. It was only April 14th and in the excitement we put out of our minds how cold the breeze was but it had caught up to us and we had to get warm. The cold affects Maureen strongly and at times dangerously because it’s not just her muscles in her legs that don’t work, her autonomic nervous system that regulates body temperature doesn’t either.

Durrell now felt he had everything he needed and he was heading back to New York with all his equipment and his footage. He did not yet know when his little piece would air. All his footage was to be turned into a 3 min piece. We assumed it would air soon like May or June at the worse. But we also knew that with the Royal Wedding and the assignation of Bin Laden, our little story would be pushed aside. But in a few weeks Durrell called and said the Today Show people had a very full summer and we were given a date of Aug 11. At first we were disappointed but then we realized this was great because by then our pilot would be done or at least close to done. Amazingly, that date held and on Aug 11 it indeed did air.

The PR value of this happening can’t be underestimated. We need a deal with some network to make the show happen. It immediately turned into an appearance on Fox and the upcoming radio interview on Oprah’s satellite network. Something will click with all of this recognition and exposure. At least that is what we are counting on.

We have a new version of the teaser (also called a “sizzle” reel) for the pilot of Who Says I Can’t the reality TV series. This now includes scenes of all three of our athletes who are part of the pilot. Maureen McKinnon is a sailor who won the gold medal in the Beijing Paraolympics and runs the disability program at Piers Park Sailing Center in East Boston. She is paralyzed from the waist down due to a fall more than a decade ago. Kelly Bruno is a track star and world class triathlete as well as a medical student at UNC Chapel Hill. She was born with only one leg and has used a prosthetic on her right leg since before she had even learned to walk. She was also a contestant on Survivor: Nicaragua just a couple of years ago. Finally Hugh Herr has been a member of the world’s most elite rock climbers and runs a robotics lab at MIT where he is the world’s leading researcher of advanced bionic prosthetics. Hugh lost both his legs below the knees when he was 17 and ice climbing on Mt. Washington and got lost and had to live in snow caves for 4 days before he and his friend were rescued. These are our three athletes in the pilot and viewers will get to really know them, their stories and see them perform at the highest level in their chosen sport. In each case, I also join them at their chosen sport trying my best to participate in that sport. Check out the pilot above.

With the recent PR from the Today Show, an interview on FOX News, an upcoming radio interview with Gayle King on Oprah Radio and hopefully more, we hope to get a buzz going about the show such that a network decides to pick it up.

I will be interviewed live on the Gayle King show on Oprah Radio (XM 111 / SIRIUS 204) on September 2 from 9-11 AM. Gayle is Oprah’s best friend. She is a major force at O Magazine and also has a show on Oprah’s TV network. This is a wonderful break for Who Says I Can’t the TV show.

The first section was not too bad. Pretty physical but not super challenging. The second section was hard, steep and technical. I developed a unique technique that used my stump, had me slither up as I pressed against the rock for friction and allowed me to make really good progress fast. They were all impressed and frankly surprised at how well I did that difficult section.

But the third and final section was my downfall. Hugh had to squeeze through a narrow slot out onto a promontory that protruded straight out from the cliff 200 feet above the ground. He then had to stand on this outcropping and reach up a sheer vertical wall to find a handhold and pull up to get his next foot perch. Right then one of his legs popped off and fell straight down 200 feet towards our ground crew who dashed for cover in a panic as we all yelled either “rock” or “leg” to warn them. Miraculously the leg did not break. Since he has been climbing with two prosthetic legs as of age 18, this had never happened to him. Hugh clipped himself securely into several places in the rock face and rested in his harness hanging 200 ft up in mid air while we got a rope down to raise his leg back up. Once he had his leg he just put it back on and continued on up the pure vertical face to the summit.

Now it was my turn. Even getting through the narrow slot was really hard and I tried many approaches so that I would be able to get my foot on the tip of the promontory and still have a way to reach way up to a first good hand hold. I was already tired from the 200 vertical feet we had already climbed. Since my technique was not clean and smooth like the really experienced experts I was inefficient — just like an inexperienced skier would be — and that meant lot’s of wasted energy was expended. I also think there was only so far my swimming arms could take me — no new physical activity is “free” and requires doing it a lot to train that new unique set of muscles. All of this plus I was really way beyond my ability on this final section. The end result was that I just ran out of gas and had to settle for a good go on just the first two sections. I would need to really improve my skills and climbing strength and go back and try this section another day. I sagged into my harness and lowered back down to the ledge I had started from and would rappel down to the cliff base from here. I was disappointed and I was concerned my team would all feel I let them down but there was no indication of that.

In the end the point of the show was made in dramatic fashion. The skill and technique of Hugh with his two specially made prosthetic legs was demonstrated gracefully and emphatically. He really is beautiful as he climbs. He is slow, careful, studied, calculating, unhesitant, and deliberate. But above all he is smooth and clean and to watch him is to watch poetry in motion as he makes vertical climbing look as easy as walking on level ground. Maybe the real reason Hugh the MIT professor was driven to create robotic powered ankles was because that was the only way walking was in fact as smooth and as comfortable for him as climbing vertical rock faces had become. Meanwhile, I demonstrated the true spirit of what I mean by Who Says I Can’t as I, someone who has never climbed anything more challenging than piles of boulders, was game to try and to learn and to adapt to this challenge. I exceeded the expert’s expectations and made a decent showing for myself especially for a first timer. Oh and for a one-legger too. Future audiences will hopefully get much inspiration from both the extreme prowess Hugh has achieved in his chosen sport as well as from my willingness to give it a try. And as is always my hope, maybe our audience will feel more motivated to face their next challenge head on with a Who Says I Can’t attitude.