Aidan Hutchinson is well on his way to being 100 percent for the start of the Lions' offseason program. Six months after fracturing his left tibia and fibula, Hutchinson said his leg "feels amazing."
"Now that I’m running, full speed going, you’re grateful when you walk that you don’t feel pain," Hutchinson said last week on the Fore Please podcast at The Masters. "This injury has definitely made me blessed for these moments. When you go from one second, you’re a high-performing athlete, running at full speed, bending corners, and the next one you can’t even get to the bathroom on your own, it’s a very humbling experience. So when you get all that stuff back, you don’t take it for granted."
Hutchinson posted a video two weeks ago that showed him sprinting and weaving from one 20-yard line to the other on the Lions' indoor practice field. Asked where he's at in his recovery process, "I'm there," he said. "I'd say I'm good."
Hutchinson said he was about to undergo his final evaluation tests in Detroit, and "once I knock ‘em out of the park, I’ll be on my way and done with rehab."
"It was a long process, I’ll tell you that," he said. "It felt pretty long, the early stages were pretty rough, but just being out of that now, you have this appreciation for your body, you have appreciation for no pain and running. I’m just happy to be done with that.
"People were loving that sprinting video, too. I didn’t think people would love it as much as they did, but I got a lot of text messages, a lot of people DM-ing me and stuff, it was cool. The support has been amazing."
Hutchinson said that getting "ripped out of the game" when he was playing the best football of his young career and being relegated to the sidelines as the Lions went 15-2 but lost in the divisional round of the playoffs afforded him newfound "empathy for people that get hurt in the NFL."
"I typically see guys in that training room and I’d be like, ‘Hey man, hope you’re alright, hope you’re doing better,’ blah-blah-blah. And then when I was in that position, it’s a funny perspective," he said.
When teammates continued to express sympathy for him weeks after the injury, "I’m sitting there like, dude, if people keep victimizing me, I’m gonna victimize myself," Hutchinson said.
"It got to a point where I loved when people came up to me and just treated me like everything was normal. I gained an understanding from a different side of the game, which I would never have without this injury. That was something that I really learned about, is having that empathy for the injured people, the guys in the training room just thugging it out," he said.