Athletics: Runyan's blind faith makes her a street-fighting woman

For one woman, New York's roads are the ultimate test

Three weeks ago Marla Runyan set out with some trepidation in the Tufts 10km road race through the streets of Boston. Her fears were very nearly well-founded: at one point she almost collided with a police motorcyclist who had stopped to answer the query of a pedestrian. She also had difficulty finding the finish line, passing it on the far side of the street from where the tape was actually located.

Still, she did manage to emerge from the race victorious, winning a United States championship title in the process. It was another triumph for the blind ambition of the 33-year-old Californian.

Runyan suffers from Stargardt's Disease, a degeneration of the retina. She has been registered blind since the age of 11. Two years ago she gained widespread recognition as the first legally blind athlete to compete at an Olympic Games, finishing eighth in the 1500m final in Sydney.

Next Sunday she tackles the ultimate challenge for any runner, let alone one with a severe visual impairment. The Boston race was Runyan's final test on the road before she runs the marathon distance for the first time, through the five boroughs of the Big Apple in the 2002 New York City Marathon.

It has to be a daunting prospect, even for a woman who has negotiated the cut-and-thrust of international track-racing without taking a single fall, and who this summer scored a notable 3,000m victory in Eugene, Oregon, over Sonia O'Sullivan, another leading entrant for the New York race.

It is one thing running seven-and-a-half laps of a track, with blurred figures to follow and the sound of the bell to listen out for; it is quite another to pick a path around a twisting, undulating course amidst a throng of 30,000 runners. And that is quite apart from the handicap of racing a marathon blind.

When the starting gun fires on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge next Sunday Runyan will not be able to read the mile markers or see where any of her rivals happen to be on the course. She will, however, have the assistance of an accompanying cyclist – as she did last month when she ran her first half-marathon, the Philadelphia Distance Run. "She gave me split times at mile markers and told me when I was approaching a water station," Runyan said. "It's really just a visual backup, to try to make an equal playing field and take my vision out of the equation as much as possible."

Runyan's degenerative vision impairment affects the centre part of the retina, the area which enables 20/20 vision. "If you take a vision test and you are only able to see the big E on the eye chart with your glasses or contact lenses, then your acuity is 20/200," she explained. "That is the defining measurement of 'legally blind'. My visual acuity is 20/400 in the right eye and 20/300 in the left. I cannot even make out the big E.

"For the most part, I do not see anyone's face very well, and someone standing 10 feet away is not always recog- nisable. My peripheral vision is still intact, though, and because of that I can get around very well by myself. I am very independent on and off the track. That has always been important to me. I have never fallen in a race, although I did go off the course once in a five-kilometre road race.

"I am used to my eyes and how the world appears to me. I have been legally blind for 22 years now, but I see myself as an athlete who has something wrong with her eyes rather than a blind athlete."

It was as a blind athlete, however, that Runyan first made her mark. She competed for the United States in two Para-lympics, winning the 100m, 200m, 400m and long jump in Barcelona in 1992 and the heptathlon in Atlanta in 1996. She also finished 10th in the US Olympic heptathlon trials in 1996, and it was a remarkable feat in itself that she then made the transition from multi-event athlete to international middle- and long-distance runner, winning the Pan American Games 1500m title in 1999 and competing in the world championships in Seville the same year.

Reaching the Olympic 1500m final in Sydney in 2000 gained Runyan worldwide acclaim, and reaching the finish line in New York on Sunday would doubtless do the same. In terms of the distance alone, the step up from the 1500m to the marathon is a massive one, though Runyan has won the US 5,000m track title for the past two years and has prepared for her ultimate challenge with some equally impressive longer races on the roads.

Despite being "stressed all the way by the course", she won the Tufts 10km race in 31min 46sec and, with her cyclist to guide her, finished second in the half-marathon in Philadelphia in 71min 19sec, 1min 59sec behind Catherine Ndereba, whose world best time for the marathon Paula Radcliffe obliterated in Chicago recently.

"I'm excited about New York," Runyan said. "You have a limited time-period to enjoy where you're at, and I thought to myself if I had to retire tomorrow my biggest regret would be not having run a marathon. Even though I have been on the track my whole life, it's something I really have a passion to do."

Runyan has such a passion for the marathon, in fact, that she has already tested herself over 10 miles of the New York course. "I figured if I could battle New York City traffic for 10 miles I can do it when the streets are clear of cars," she said.