Following his escape from the Farc, a bomb almost killed him.
The clearing was hacked from the rainforest. His family earned a living by growing fruit. The region was occupied by illegal armed groups at night.
If they were repeat offenders, they were taken, tightly bound, and either left for the night or executed. There were bodies on the forest paths.
There was no television or real roads. When other children followed football teams, Miller and his brother, Florian, would sneak out and watch the tracer fire that lit up the night sky, cheering on the army in their fight against the Farc and other rebel groups.
The army allowed us to play outside until late and the children were safe from forced recruitment.
The Farc, which was founded in 1966 and was dissolved in 2016 after signing a ceasefire, were regular callers to the family home.
When they were young, both Miller and Florian decided to become soldiers. When Miller was 23, he went to the nearest town and presented his documents at a checkpoint, and was told he was needed for military service. He didn't complain.
A group of Farc soldiers visited the family of Florian in their isolated forest clearing. They said that the family had given a son to the forces of reaction, so they owed another to the revolution.
My mother tried to fight them. She begged them. She blessed me through her tears when they led me away.
The conflict that killed 260,000 people and left six million people internally displaced between 1954 and 2016 was dragged into by the way that Florian was born. He was one of over 18,000 minor recruits recruited by the Farc during their five decades of armed struggle as the country's largest rebel group.
"We were put under a lot of psychological pressure," he says. The values they taught were not in line with my mother's. I was thinking about escaping. I was looking, listening, and planning. deserters were shot for betraying the cause
He saw his chance to escape after resisting their indoctrination, a year into his life as a child guerrilla.
A photo of him as a soldier is shown by his wife.
The 27th Front was sent to attack the police station. The army flew in choppers.
He says that they spotted them and fired. I hid under a tree. I shuffled around the trunk as the helicopter circled above.
A man and his wife were unaware that Florian burst into their farmhouse as his companions fled.
There were a lot of Farc sympathizers in those parts, and they received a bounty if they handed in deserters, so I said, "One false move and I'll shoot."
I told them I needed clothes. The man gave me some clothes. I made him and his wife get down on the floor and I changed out of my fatigues. I ran out of the house when I told them not to get up.
I found an army roadblock and threw away my rifle. I told the officer that I was a guerrilla and wanted to turn myself in. I told him I had not eaten in a while. I told them my story after they gave me food. They asked what battalion my brother was in. They confirmed that I was who I claimed to be after my brother reported my forced recruitment.
He was placed under army protection.
He was afraid to go out in the street if they found him. It was frightening. I was young and had a powerful enemy.
His mother had to flee the farm with her other children, who were sent to boarding school for their safety.
He joined the army when he was 18. He spent 12 years fighting drug gangs. His brother Miller was killed in a gunfight with the Farc in the town of El Dorado, Meta, about 350 km south-eastern of Bogota.
He shot and killed a man in a very confused operation. He shot his best friend when they identified the body. He was hit very hard. He went into shock.
Miller began to show signs of paranoia. On leave, he went to see him. The mother refused to pay a tax demanded by the Farc. She had been found in her new home. A package appeared in the yard.
I remember seeing something by the door. I squatted and reached out my hands as I walked towards it. I remember lying on the ground screaming. My arms were gone.
My right leg was torn off. I had second- and third-degree burns. I had lost hearing in my right ear. My brother was holding my head, and I yelled "kill me". Shoot me. I can't live like this.
He stroked my head and told me not to ask. You're going to be fine. I was yelling at him to make him angry. I passed out.
He woke up after 12 days in a coma. After months of operations and skin grafts, it was over. He was overwhelmed by depression, thoughts of suicide and other feelings.
He contemplated throwing himself out the window or down the stairwell. I wondered if I would end up worse if I failed. I wanted to jump in front of a car so I decided to learn to walk. I came to the same conclusion, what if I survive?
The para-cycling road race and time trial champion was Florian.
After months in intensive care, and endless expressions of sympathy, he had the good fortune to be transferred to the Private Jose Maria Hernandez Battalion, a special corps in the Colombian Army for those traumatised from the conflict.
"I was sick of being pitied, but I found myself in a place of laughter and camaraderie," he says. The other soldiers called me 'Quarter Chicken'. They laughed at me when they touched my stumps. We had fist fights, but no one had any fists. I came back to life in their company.
He began hydrotherapy as part of his treatment. The group sessions quickly became competitive.
He beat his colleagues over a length of the pool because he could hold his breath longer. He began to improve on his times. In the pool he met people who had been injured in traffic accidents, or were affected by diseases. The military team had a swimmer.
Some of my friends spent their lives drinking. He wants a different life.
I began to swim longer distances. With the few limbs I had left, my ambition grew. There were no obstacles in para- swimming. I was coming from a treatment where I had to take medication to sleep. I got off my medication after swimming. Swimming became my medication.
The University of Minnesota hosted an event in which Florian won a medal. He competed in the S5 butterfly class for three years and broke records all over the world.
He won a medal at the national games. After the explosion, he was discharged from the army and started a university degree in psychology. He decided to pursue another sport after being unable to compete in the military Para-swimming team.
He says that his stepfather was obsessed with cycling. He had a transistor radio to listen to the race.
Even as a child, Juan never rode a bike.
I thought I wouldn't. I assumed you needed arms, legs, eyes, and reflexes.
But he was curious and that got the better of him.
Someone gave my sister a bike to ride. I took it into a back street with a friend and tied the stumps of my arms to the handlebars with rope and set off.
I thought I would topple over. I had thousands of negative thoughts. I realized that I was wrong when I pushed the pedal with my good leg. I told my friend to let go. I shouted "I can be a cyclist!" when I rode up the street. I can be a cyclist.
The wife of a man set about helping adapt a bike. She used power tools to turn metal sheets into buckets for his arms, but it caused him back pain. He asked for help from the national sports authorities. In vain.
The Paralympic system is more open to athletes who have suffered minor disabilities than to triple amputees. We are seen as a potentially expensive problem or as patients in rehabilitation.
He found the solution himself.
His wife is with him in training.
The Air Maintenance Corps of the Colombian Air Force is based in the coffee-growing region of the country, where I was invited to give a motivational talk. They wanted me to tell them about my life story and what I was doing.
The engineers were experts in aerodynamics and worked with carbon fibre. I asked if they could modify my bike, and they said they had never worked with bikes.
"They took some ideas from their usual work, some of my ideas, and we began working on weight, aerodynamics, everything."
He thinks he has more amputations than any other cyclist. His injuries are a problem for bike designers. The aircraft engineers took an 18 kilogram bike and made it lighter by using state-of-the-art carbon fibre.
He funded trips to World Cup events in Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands, and the World Championships in the Netherlands and Portugal by adding voluntary contributions and small sponsors to his army pension.
The telecommunications firm began to sponsor him. He took on a superhero.
People with amputations are called mochos. When I started cycling, I wondered if I could be Mochoman if we had heroes like Superman or Batman.
With only three places for Para-cycling and a long list of eight riders, Florian failed in his bid to go to the Tokyo Paralympics. He took it in a positive way. He says he's still alive and there's another Olympics coming.
In November this year, he was crowned the national para-cycling champion of the country.
He has a new target. He wants to race an iron man triathlon. He says the bomb that nearly killed him was a gift of life.
He says that he is in the process of running, jogging and is very excited. We are going to start working on it with the people that I have, because I don't have a special prosthesis or a medical team to support me.
I want to show the world that you can do it. It's not just about rehabilitation. We lose a lot of human talent in the army and police force because of armed conflict.
I want to be the voice of the wounded soldiers.
