Published: August 5, 2025
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Austin Zulka spends an hour a day exercising. He alternates between running and cycling. Saturdays are his “long days,” a chance to test his body and his cardiovascular fitness with longer-than-normal runs or bike rides.
And it shows.
At age 30, Austin looks like he’s in the physical prime of his life. He feels that way too. Still, as good as he feels today is as bad as it was eight years ago, when he was 22 and barely able to walk.
Austin was always an active person. He was a college cheerleader at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond. He then enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve. He had also taken up powerlifting, to keep up his physical fitness. One day in 2017 — during a powerlifting competition — he walked up to the barbell, intending to deadlift it.
He dug his heels into the ground, took a deep breath and hinged at the hips, pulling the bar up. However, at the apex of his motion, he stood up too tall, too quickly.
“Whenever I stood up and I overcorrected like that, I knew it,” Austin said. “It all hit me, and I knew something wasn’t right.”
Austin herniated a disc in his lower back, but he wasn’t sure how badly he was injured until the next day, when he started experiencing both bowel and bladder incontinence at work. He went straight to the hospital, where he needed an emergency discectomy.
“There was a lot of pain and a lot of restricted movement,” Austin said. “The doctors removed the disc. They didn’t do a fusion or anything, so I ended up bone-on-bone with my vertebrae. Whenever I was sitting down, getting up, it was catching and causing a lot of pain. I couldn’t really do anything.”
But Austin experienced more than just constant pain.
He got an infection in his spine. He couldn’t move his left leg, and he developed a tremor in his left hand. He spent time in an inpatient rehabilitation facility to clear the infection and learn how to walk again.
“I couldn’t run, couldn’t lift, couldn’t play with my kids,” Austin said. “I was restricted from what I could do.”
Austin’s road to true recovery hit another roadblock in 2023.
His pain was come-and-go, and one afternoon he thought he’d get on the trampoline and jump around with his kids. He felt a twinge in his back. He reaggravated his injury.
“It was just one of those things,” he said. “I felt that pain and knew I still wasn’t really right.”
He finally came in contact with Mitchell J. Campbell, M.D., spine surgeon at Norton Leatherman Spine, who talked to Austin about his options. Other doctors had suggested a typical spinal fusion, but Dr. Campbell had other ideas. Austin was still young, and his bones and joints were still in good shape. Dr. Campbell recommended an artificial disc replacement at the lowest two vertebrae of the lumbar spine. The surgery would remove the worn-out disc in Austin’s lower back and replace it with an artificial one, made of a combination of metal and plastic.
“A fusion is analogous to taking a wheel off an 18-wheeler,” Dr. Campbell said. “Something picks up the load. In this case, it’s the other 17 wheels. But with a disc replacement, we’ve now replaced the wheel, keeping the car intact. Now, the spine is going to continue to move as it should, so the wear and tear, or the next-level degenerating, has just been diminished.”
Austin agreed, and in September 2023, Dr. Campbell performed the surgery.
“There was a lot of nervousness,” Austin said. “[Dr. Campbell] explained the risks, and hearing them aloud made me nervous. But he triple-checked and made sure I was OK with them, which helped calm me down and give me the confidence to get through it.”
“If you pick the right person and do the right operation the right way, [an artificial disc replacement] is life changing,” Dr. Campbell said. “We have a lot of boxes to check before I say, ‘yes, you’re the right person.’ They have to have good bone quality and fail about a year of conservative treatment. Surgery is one of those bridges that once you cross, you can’t go back. So, we make sure we do our due diligence.”
The first few weeks after surgery were rough.
Austin experienced frequent muscle spasms. He was living with restrictions — no bending, twisting or arching his back. The pain was still there, but he believed he’d turn the corner.
Eventually, the pain subsided, and he was finally able to do things he hadn’t done in years.
“My mom saw me get down and play with my kids on the floor for the first time in a long time,” Austin said. “It [was] everything to me. I hadn’t played with my kids in a long time like that. I couldn’t play tag with them. I couldn’t run and jump and do all those things with them. Being able to go out and chase them around on the playground and play soccer with them and coach my son’s T-ball team. That’s how I knew I was back.”
Austin’s recovery has gone so well, he decided to push himself even further. He began to run after surgery and stopped lifting as heavily as he used to. His body responded well. What were once long walks became runs. And as his body continued to respond, he continued to increase his distance.
So much so, that in July 2024 — just 10 months after his surgery with Dr. Campbell — Austin completed the Run Under the Stars, a 12-hour ultramarathon, where runners complete as many miles as possible in a 12-hour span. Austin finished 44 miles, an incredible feat for someone who, a few years prior, thought he may never walk again.
Yet he wasn’t finished.
Austin’s body has continued to respond, and he’s continued to push himself. He’s now training for November’s Fall Creek 100, a 100-mile event in Tennessee. It’s the last step to prove to himself that he’s fully back to the way he used to be before his injury.
“I’m grateful for my kids and everything that I have now,” Austin said. “So while I don’t give it too much thought, life could’ve looked significantly different. It’s peaceful for me, and it’s good to know I can do it.”
“You take someone who can’t walk, or has bad spinal narrowing, and you bring them back to somewhat normalcy, and it’s a feeling that’s hard to describe,” Dr. Campbell said. “Someone with chronic pain, people who say to themselves, ‘I can’t live like this,’ that’s what we do this for.”