I run, seeing nothing but the open track just in front of me. Other feet keep a steady cadence alongside me. I don't know how many runners might be ahead of me, or behind. The pack is a creature of many colors, breathing and jostling around me. The pace quickens, and we bear down. Only then does the creature break apart, and string out. I feel the gentle curve that initiates the last 200-meter drive for home, and the final sprint down the straightaway. Now I am running against individuals, but who? Who was that who just passed me? Who am I gaining ground on ahead? Who cares, I say to myself. Knowing their names doesn't make it easier to beat them.

I can't see the finish line.

I cross it.

I lean over, gasping. I feel someone, a rival, take my hand. We jog around the track together, trying to get our wind back, and wait for the order of finish to be posted. Suddenly, above my own labored breathing, I hear the crowd roar.

"Who won?" I ask.

"You did," she says.

I see sunlight, but I don't always like it. Light can illuminate, but too much light is blinding, and that's one of the more basic truths of this world. If life were a matter of sunny weather all the time, with not a cloud in the perfect blue sky; if there were only light, and more light, with never any rain or shade, you wouldn't see a thing but brightness itself. Light is no good without its opposite -- you can't see a thing without a little dark.

What do I see? I've been asked that question, in one form or another, since I was small. I suppose the question is of importance now because I'm the first legally blind athlete to compete in the Olympic Games, and people think that if they can figure out exactly what I see, they'll know what is possible and what is not. They wonder how a woman who is only partially sighted can race at distances of 1500 and 5000 meters in world-class company, and I suppose it's not an unreasonable question, especially if you've seen me drag my nose across a printed page with a magnifying lens cradled in one eye, or watched me narrowly dodge a parking meter that's in plain sight. My answer is, when you run as fast as I do, things tend to be a blur anyway.

The first time I heard the question, I was a little girl, sitting on a white-tiled kitchen counter in my childhood home in Camarillo, California. The person speaking to me was my mother. "What do you see?" she asked. "Can you see that calendar on the wall?" My mother constantly tried to puzzle through my blindness, to define the boundaries of my vision, as if she could get to the bottom of it and, in doing so, fix it.

My answer was not so simple. Did I see the standard-sized calendar hanging just eight feet in front of me? I knew it existed. I could see the disruption in the wallpapered kitchen wall, a pattern of Crayola-like red and yellow flowers. But could I see the bold text that told me what month it was, or the small squares that represented the days? The answer was no. I saw a white rectangle.

I couldn't see my teacher's writing on a chalkboard, either. Or street signs. Or the letters on a vision chart, with the exception of the big E.

"The doctor said you're legally blind," my mother explained. "If you can't see the letters below the big E, you're legally blind."

"No, I'm not," I said.

It was my initial knee-jerk response to blindness, and I still have it.

The problem here is one of perception: people confuse "disabled" with "inept." I am partly disabled, yes -- but I am not incompetent. I have an edge of peripheral vision that, although cloudy, is enough to let me negotiate a world-class footrace. I can see people's feet. I can see the colors of my competitors' uniforms. I can see the red Mondo track surface, and the waving of flags -- although I don't know which nations they represent.

I just can't see the finish line.

When I run a race, I don't always know whether I've won or lost. I can't see the clocks, or the lap counters, or the scoreboards. I only know that the finish is at the end of the straightaway. But you'd be wrong if you supposed that my vision loss impairs my running, because I'm a 32-year-old woman, and I've been running for a very long time now, and I've come to understand that there is no finish line.

In the summer between my third-and fourth-grade years, a disease attacked my retinas and deprived me of most of my vision. One spring, I could read my grade-school textbooks, and the next autumn, I couldn't. After various misdiagnoses and other misadventures in several optometrists' chairs, I learned that I had Stargardt's disease, a degenerative ailment that essentially leaves holes in the delicate, light-sensitive membrane in the back of your eyes that absorbs and translates images. Stargardt's had damaged the central area of my retinas, called the macula. After it ran its course, the details of the world had disappeared from my central view. I was left with a slim band of peripheral vision, and even that sight was flawed and needed correction.

I've lived with Stargardt's for so long now that my eyes seem ordinary to me, and I can barely remember what it was like to fully see. I only remember that things began to seem farther and farther away. Such as print. A soccer ball at the other end of the field. And the faces of the people I knew.

My answer was to run. I believed that when I was outdoors, my vision was irrelevant. Indoors, in a classroom or a living room, I was impaired, because I strained to read a book or see a television screen, or even to know whom I was talking to. But when I was outdoors and running, I felt the same as everyone else.

And then I realized something extraordinary: I didn't just feel the same as everyone else when I ran -- I felt better.

I've been running ever since. I ran through high school in Camarillo, and through college and graduate school at San Diego State University, where I graduated cum laude and earned a master's degree in teaching children who are blind and deaf. I ran through a lot of setbacks and failure. I ran through bureaucratic hoops and red tape. I ran in obscurity, when all I earned was minimum wage from the local YMCA. I ran at the World Championships in Seville, Spain, and at the Sydney Olympic Games, where I finished eighth in the 1500 meters. I'm still running, and I'm now the top-ranked woman and the indoor record-holder in the United States in the 5000 meters, and a potential medal contender in that event. But through it all, I hope I've run for the right reasons: to value effort for its own sake, and to prove that impairment does not preclude excellence.

At times, people have not expected much from me, solely because I'm partially blind. I can feel them thinking, "Oh, you're visually impaired, just go sit on the couch." When I'm about to run a race, I can hear people whispering, "There's this blind girl running, isn't that great?"

But I believe that you can be more disabled by your attitude than by vision loss.

My vision is a relative thing: I don't really know how it compares to yours, because the only eyes I see through are my own. I'll tell you some of the things that I see, and some of the things that I don't. I can't see the numbers on a wristwatch, or the "Campbell's" on a can of soup in the grocery store. I can't see a menu, a newspaper, the address on an envelope, or the amount on a paycheck. I can't always see whether there's a curb in front of me, or a pothole, or a tree root.

I can't see my own writing. My printing is a kind of shorthand that resembles a child's writing, with missing letters and incomplete lines. My signature changes each time I sign a check or a credit-card receipt, and I've even been asked to produce other forms of ID to prove my identity.

Here's what I do see: a permanent blot in front of my eyes that almost has physical properties. It is a large oval that blinks and flickers like a strobe light. It has no particular color or definition, but it moves across walls and ceilings and blue skies like a gray stain. It is not something tangible, that's really in front of me. It's inside me -- inside my eyes and retinas.

Imagine that someone took a flash picture, and the flash got in your eyes. For a few moments, you'd see a purplish or gray splotch, and no matter how hard you tried to look around it, it would still be there, right in the center. In a few minutes it would fade away, and the world around you would appear normal again.

For me, it stays.

That thing is always in the middle of my eyes -- the indistinct blinking, like a sunspot. Sometimes I change my focus point, hoping to see around the obstructing mass and gain a clearer view of what's in front of me. But the blot moves just as quickly as my eyes, and blocks the view. The blot is the actual scar tissue in the retina, and each eye's scar tissue has its own shape.

But the will to see is primordial -- the mind insists on trying to provide itself with some kind of image even when the eyes physically cannot comply. My eyes continually move and shift in an effort to compensate for my blindness. The good area of one eye tries to fill in for the bad area of the other. If we were talking, you might think it was rude of me to stare over your left shoulder -- but actually, I see best out of the corners of my eyes, the area untouched by Stargardt's.

But no matter how my eyes compensate, there are some things I simply can't do. I have trouble crossing streets, especially a street with more than two lanes.

The hardest thing for me to see is something directly in front of me. A parking meter, or a person standing alone, or anything stationary, seems to jump out at me. It appears out of thin air and I have to quickly dodge it.

Shortly before the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, my partner, Matt Lonergan, and I went for a run in Colorado Springs. We took a cement bike path that encircled a small lake. Like all distance runners, I'm attracted to soft surfaces, so I decided to veer off to the sand at the water's edge.

I didn't see a rope stretched across the sand, securing a boat. Matt glanced over his shoulder. Before he could say, "Watch out!" I tripped over it. It looked like my legs had been cut from under me. I face-planted.

I only run into objects that are perfectly still.

The truth is, running is the easiest thing I do. To run a race around a perfectly flat and smooth track, in a controlled environment, among a group of familiar people all moving at a similar pace, feels safe to me compared to the effort I have to put forth, and the menace I confront, in moving through an ordinary day in ordinary life.

How I run is a complicated and interesting question. I count heavily on my alternative senses: on the cadence of my stride and the sensations of the earth beneath my feet. I sometimes have no idea who my competitors are because I can't see their faces, but I do know some of them by the colors of their singlets, the shapes of their physiques, and the attitudes of their bodies. In a race, the uniform colors are particularly vivid because so many runners wear gear provided by their sponsors, such as ASICS, adidas, or Nike, and each company uses distinct palettes and patterns from season to season.

More often, I identify people by how they move and walk. In college I could always find my coach, Rahn Sheffield, because he had a certain strut across the track. Some runners are unique; their attributes are quickly identifiable even by me. In Sydney, I knew instantly when the Romanian world champion, Gabriela Szabo, jogged by me during our warmup, because of her size and idiosyncratic shuffle. Her feet turn over like little wheels, and her five-foot, 93-pound frame floated past me efficiently and quietly on the grass infield. The absence of sound was a dead giveaway.

Sometimes the specific identity of a runner is so indistinguishable to me that I don't know enough to be intimidated by who I'm running against. When I competed in the heptathlon, I lined up against Jackie Joyner-Kersee on more than one occasion and never knew that at my elbow was the greatest female athlete in history.

So, in an odd way, maybe my sight, or lack thereof rather, is a beneficial thing. I'm forced to run for the pure performance of it. I don't run for medals, although I've won my share. I run for the aesthetic and kinesthetic experience, the act of running itself. Running, to me, is freedom from confusion and obstacle. It is liberation from the medical technology that has slowed me down since I was a child. Running is freedom from the sedentary and the stagnant. It is movement, and it is simple.

I've come to believe that sight takes a multitude of forms. There is what I literally see, but also what I perceive, and that perception can be based on a variety of factors, from sound, to texture, to intuition.

Memory and recognition can provide a kind of sight too. When I first moved to Eugene and tried to run the soft, groomed wood-chip trails around town, I was constantly hesitant and unsure of where to put my feet. I ran like I was on eggshells. But now I've learned the trails like the back of my hand, and can run nineteen miles on a wood-chip trail, up hills, on and off curbs, without a glitch in my stride or a second of hesitation.

I know every little divot and incline of the Amazon trail from countless miles of interval workouts and four-to-five-mile tempo runs. I swear I have worn a groove right through the soggy soil from running so many loops. I can't see the detailed textural differences in my path, whether it's a raised root or a dip, but I know them from memory. It's only when I get down and tie my shoe, and my face is a foot from the ground, that I notice the components of the brown trail. It contains different colors, and an oatmeal texture, but the wood chips aren't distinctive. I don't always know when a leaf is a leaf and a wood chip is a wood chip, as opposed to something a dog left.

I rely on my other senses to do something as simple as catching the bus. If I stand at a bus stop at home in Eugene waiting for the bus, all I see is a plethora of lights coming toward me, the headlamps of cars intermingling with the flashing of stoplights and the flickering of caution lights. I count heavily on hearing the grunt of a bus engine, and it's so familiar to me that sometimes I really think I do see the bus.

I perceive via the temperature of the air, the grain of a running trail, the sounds around me, and the aromas -- the piney smell that tells me I'm in the woods, or the car exhaust that tells me I'm nearing an intersection. My body finds a thousand alternate ways to fill in what is missing for me. I am most attuned when I run.

Perhaps to run is my way of becoming more sighted. Henry David Thoreau wrote, "We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our flesh and blood and bones." Running is my way of regaining control over my body, and it is as much an interior act as exterior, an exercise in moving ever inward to meet myself. Emil Zátopek, the 1952 Olympic marathon champion, said, "Whoever wants to win something runs 100 meters. Whoever wants to experience something runs the marathon." I'm a distance runner, and I run for the experience. When I run smoothly, I feel in concert with the world, muscles rocking and limbs turning in rhythm with the globe.

That's why I run -- because it's a way of experiencing the world through sound and touch and movement. I can stand not to see the world, but I can't stand not to move through it. The body was designed to move, and running is one of the basic building blocks of movement.

Movement is independence. In fact, the senses that I rely on most heavily have to do with my ability to move. Just being able to put my hands on something, or to feel whether I am standing on a hardwood floor or a wood-chip trail, is significant to me. If I want to see something, I must move toward it.

Moving through the world is my way of envisioning it.

I've become so practiced at moving through the world that often people don't realize I'm partially blind. I've consistently refused to conform to the definition of "legally blind," and I try to function more like a sighted person, sometimes even to the point of foolhardiness. This is a victory of sorts -- and what I've been striving for, ever since I was diagnosed.

But it's also a form of denial. I think sometimes I've caused myself as many problems as I've solved.

I can compete for a medal in the 1500 meters in international competition, and yet I can't recognize someone five feet in front of me. This confuses people, and it hasn't fostered social acceptance, either. I set out to keep my blindness a secret in high school, and I mostly succeeded. But my pride came with a price. I set myself up for a lot of misunderstanding -- I forgot that people could see me better than I could see them, and my face clearly displayed every mood I was in. How are other people supposed to know that I have no idea who the woman is ten feet away from me unless I can hear her voice?

How many times have I ventured outdoors only to learn that the long-sleeved shirt I've put on with "matching" shorts is really green and the shorts are purple? "Who's that girl with the green shirt and purple shorts?" others ask as I charge down the trail laughing at myself. "Oh, it's just Marla." As much as I rely on colors, I can't always see them. With Stargardt's, as you lose visual acuity, you also lose some ability to distinguish colors in dim light.

I could be an arm's length from Matt Lonergan, the man I live with, and not know he's there. What I do see is his familiar beige jacket, or his posture, or the way he crosses his legs, or the way he sits sipping his coffee while he reads Track & Field News. When I see those things, I know it's him. I can make out his face -- his large nose, or a smile -- when he's very close to me. But I still don't know the color of his eyes.

One of my former coaches, Mike Manley, shaved his beard one day, and when he stood in front of me that afternoon, I didn't recognize him. A former training partner was always identifiable by her blond ponytail. But one afternoon she sat next to me on a bench and I had no idea who she was. She had cut her hair.

I don't see facial expressions. Very often I rely on what's said and how it is articulated, and not whether someone is smiling or grimacing. But no matter how tone-sensitive I am, I miss things.

In high school I memorized the colors of my friends' clothing so I could find them in the hallway between classes. But I couldn't tell male from female without the sound of a voice or some other clue to help me. There were countless times in high school when I walked right by people I knew, and I wasn't able to say hello because I wasn't sure who I was passing and I didn't want to embarrass myself by making a mistake.

The first time I really saw a face, I mean really saw it, was in a movie theatre. I was 17 years old and the movie was Aliens. My 12-year-old cousin Melody and I arrived late, and the only seats left were in the front row. I sat with a cricked neck, my head resting on the back of the theatre seat, but I saw every pore and bead of sweat on Sigourney Weaver's face. It was fascinating. Aliens quickly became my favorite horror movie, not just because Sigourney Weaver was a designated bad-ass, but because I could see the details of human expression.

To go into the world blindly is to play a game of trust. Every day, you plunge into a swirl of confusion -- and sometimes fear and frustration. The rest of the world has all the information, while you do not. This requires you to strike a delicate and constant balance between wariness and faith. Sometimes no amount of self-sufficiency can help you, and when that happens, you have a choice: You can get angry, or you can trust in the basic benevolence of the universe and the essential goodwill of people, and hope you don't get hurt.

Don't we all live that way, really? Blind or not?

If the alternative is to remain at home and never hazard anything, to allow wariness to overcome faith, I consistently choose the opposite. It's not always a comfortable choice, and on occasion I've felt that I live in two different worlds. Sometimes I feel very, very visually impaired, and at other times I feel almost fully sighted. I live in a no-man's land.

I feel most blind when I have to read something in a public place. Every printed thing is unreadable and inaccessible to me -- unless I have a powerful aid, like an eight-power magnifier or a closed-circuit television, which you can't exactly carry on errands. Think of all the times in a day when you look at print, from reading the newspapers in the morning, to scanning a computer screen, to filling out a job application, to ordering a coffee off the menu at Starbucks. Now try to go an entire day without reading anything.

I'll go to a grocery store or a coffee shop and feel completely impaired. I feel most blind when I'm in a rush to get something done, like find the right gate number in an airport. I have to ask someone to help me, explaining my situation. It's only recently that I've made my peace with asking for that help.

But there are very few things I haven't been able to master, once I've applied myself to overcoming the obstacle.

People can become caught up in that term "legally blind." They make sweeping assumptions based on the definition. But there are subtle degrees and whole ranges of sight and countless terms to describe them: there is low vision, partially sighted, visually impaired. Back in the '70s there was much debate about whether "visually impaired" was a more proper term than "visually handicapped."

These days, "person first" language is the politically correct descriptor. So I'm defined as a "person with a vision impairment." The terminology has become more important than the particulars of each individual's range of vision and ability to adapt. And that, to me, is silly. You can use any term you like, but it doesn't define me. In the end, it's my responsibility to ensure that the attributes by which I would prefer to be defined are more visible to you than my blindness.

I can't see well, and I run. So let's get on with it.

What I find most ironic is that if there is interest in this story, it is based partly on that term "legally blind." People say, "She's not supposed to run that fast. She's blind." But perhaps we should ask whether our definition of legally blind should be changed.

I've met visually impaired people with doctorates, and I've met some who are content to sit on the sofa and say, "I'm blind." It all comes down to perception -- how do you perceive your vision loss? That perception, to me, is far more significant than how you perform on the vision test. It's up to the individual to determine what she can and can't do.

My own perception of vision loss is that it's a challenge, like a long-distance race. It requires perseverance and patience and a positive attitude. It's a race -- with no end in sight. Perhaps that's why the longer track events are what I'm best at. In an event requiring perseverance and patience and the surmounting of obstacles, I'm in my element. Just as I talk myself through each lap of the 400-meter track, I talk myself through each year of my life, and remind myself that fatigue and frustration are only temporary, and I must keep moving forward.

My blindness is a positive thing. It provides a sharp contrast between the easy and the difficult. It not only has forced me to prove my competence but also has pushed me to achieve. It has given me gifts, such as will and commitment, that I use every day.

This book is just another kind of endeavor to see. It's my attempt to put images together into a complete picture, to find the gaps in my vision and to fill them in with something more whole.

Copyright © 2001 by Marla Runyan