From Paralympics to Olympics: Runyan makes us see possibilities

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By GARY SHELTON

© St. Petersburg Times, published September 26, 2000

SYDNEY, Australia -- Later. Later, Marla Runyan would think about the gold.

For the moment, she was having enough trouble with the green.

She steered her way through the warehouse that is the cafeteria at the Olympic athletes village, weaving through the chairs and the clatter and the competitors. She moved with a sense of purpose. She moved with a sense of urgency. She moved with a goal in mind. Sometimes, steamed broccoli makes you that way.

Finally, she was in the line, and she pointed at the green stuff in the container. Then she made her way back to the table and she discovered ... peas. So she went back again, like in a second heat in a race, and again found something green. When she got back to the table she discovered ... spinach. A third time she maneuvered through the crowd. This time she asked. This time she got her broccoli.

In this little journey you can discover so much about Runyan's bigger one, the one that has brought her to Sydney to compete in the 1,500-meter run. You can find the determination, the independence and, yes, the hunger. You can also discover this:

Runyan is legally blind.

This is a story about vision, Runyan's and ours. This is the kind of story we always look for at the Olympics, a story not about gold medals and endorsement opportunities, not about drugs or politics. This is a story about a woman who will make you notice her abilities as well as her disability.

Hers is a world of blurs and smudges, of unidentifiable faces and unreadable signs. She moves around the track, listening to her competitors breathe, trying to discern the mixture of colors, like melted crayons, moving around her, trying to judge whether the other runners really are the distance ahead of her they appear to be.

This is where Runyan is at her best, on the track, where she doesn't need the bulky, accursed vision equipment that enables her damaged retinas to see. Where she doesn't have to explain to people what she can still see and what she cannot.

"It's the one place where I feel a sense of freedom, where I'm independent," said Runyan, who was born and raised in California. "I have a sense of strength on the track that I don't have in other areas of my life."

The vision in her left eye is 20/300. In her right eye it is 20/400. She does not drive. She cannot read road signs. She cannot see faces 10 feet in front of her. There is a watch on her wrist, but she isn't certain why she wears it. There is a mobile phone in her pocket, like all the other athletes have, but she cannot make out the numbers. To watch television, she needs a pair of glasses made of high-powered telescopic lenses.

Ah, but she can run. She can get from this step to the next one, an incredible, inspirational journey that has taken her from the Paralympics to the Olympics, from the heptathlon to middle-distance running, from someone who cannot see to someone you must see.

Imagine for a moment the beginning of her race, some 21 years ago. She was 9 then, a fourth-grade girl who was having trouble seeing the blackboard. When she read, she held her books so close to her face, the pages brushed her nose. One doctor told her she was going to be blind. Another said her problems were imagined. It was only later it was discovered she had Stargardt's disease, a degenerative macular disorder.

"Honestly, I didn't have much fear," Runyan said. "I was young enough that I didn't think about the years ahead. I thought about that day. Would I be able to play my violin? Would I be able to play soccer? It wasn't about, "Will I be able to drive? Will I be able to live independently?' I wasn't thinking about those things. I dealt with each obstacle as it came along."

When she was 14, Runyan was no longer able to see the soccer ball. She turned to track, and she discovered she was good at it. She went to San Diego State, and she decided to become a heptathlete. She was good enough to win gold medals in the Paralympics of '92 and '96.

Now she is in the Olympics, an incredible leap. She makes other runners nervous, to tell the truth. Much of the 1,500 is like a scrum, the athletes jostling and elbowing each other like rebounders jockeying for position. Trading paint, they call it in NASCAR. But when an athlete cannot see clearly, others get cautious.

"I've never caused an injury or an incident," Runyan said. "I'm not a klutz. I can maneuver around people. But whenever there is contact, people point the finger at me. Hey, there were incidents in '96, or in '84 with Mary Slaney, and I wasn't in those race. If you put 12 very fast runners in Lane One, there is going to be contact."

What does she see? She sees colors and fuzz, a picture like one seen through a camera lens covered in Vaseline. She sees body shapes and haircuts. She sees finish lines.

What do the rest of us see? We see an independent woman who cannot see life's stop signs. We see a woman with sight that is limited, a woman who makes the rest of us see the things that are unlimited.

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