91����

You’d have to be brave or crazy to subject yourself to electric shocks. Dan Kosick ’00, MSW ’06, is a bit of both, seeing obstacles as opportunities.

He competes in obstacle-course races where he climbs walls, crawls under barbed wire and gets zapped with electricity. Add one more obstacle — Kosick runs the courses on a prosthetic leg. A friend suggested in 2013 that he give it a try.

“When I did my first race, I struggled for the last few miles with some significant prosthetic issues,” Kosick says. “I was sore and I couldn’t really see for two days after because I got so much mud in my eyes that my corneas got scratched. But one thing was for certain: I wanted to do another one.”

And he has been at it ever since. Kosick earned a place in the record books as the first above-knee amputee to complete 50 miles at the World’s Toughest Mudder. While noteworthy, the feat wasn’t his first significant sporting accomplishment.

At age 15, Kosick — a star lacrosse player — felt a strange pain in his ankle, which turned out to be cancer. To prevent it from spreading, doctors amputated his right leg. After receiving a prosthetic, Kosick learned to walk and run, and he still had the urge to compete.

“In 1995, I attended a ski racing camp, and I came home with the goal that I wanted to make the U.S. Adaptive Alpine Ski Team,” he says. There’s no stopping Dan Kosick “I went to school in the fall semester, [then] packed up my car and drove out West. I lived full time in Colorado, training, made up my schooling in the summer, and my dedication paid off.”

He made the U.S. Disabled Alpine Ski Team and had top-10 finishes in the Paralympics in 1998 in Nagano, Japan, and in 2002 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

“I was a teenager coming from Johnson City, and I was now able to travel the world … meeting so many interesting people and learning about new cultures. Until that point, my most diverse experience was going to EPCOT Center,” he says.

Today, he’s a middle-school social worker in the 91���� area, coaching lacrosse. He’s always up for new challenges and was part of a group that, in September 2018, summited Cotopaxi, an active stratovolcano in the Andes Mountains in Ecuador.

“Because I took on this new adventure [climbing Cotopaxi] ... I was fortunate enough to become a Merrell shoe brand ambassador in 2018,” he says. “Every athlete grows up wanting to be sponsored by a shoe company. And here I was, at 41, getting a shoe sponsor, which was really cool.”​