When Marla Runyan ran the 1,500-meter race in the 2000 Olympic games in Sydney, she saw only a blur of color fly by her. She could hear the pack move behind her as she pulled out in front, and — in a sudden burst of speed — each runner sprinted toward the finish line.
Those four minutes of Runyan’s life depended on four years of training. She crossed the finish line, but when she stopped running, the images did not dissolve back into a clear picture. The world couldn’t come back into focus, because Runyan is legally blind.
Runyan, 31, became the first legally blind person to compete on the U.S. Olympic team. Her eighth-place ranking for the 1,500 meter was the highest achieved by an American woman in the event’s history.
“When you run as fast as I do, things tend to be a blur anyway,” Runyan said in her newly released autobiography, “No Finish Line: My Life As I See It.”
To be considered legally blind, an individual must have a visual acuity of worse than 20/200 in his or her better eye even while using eyeglasses, according to the Western Australian Retinitis Pigmentosa Foundation’s Web site.
At 9 years old, Runyan was diagnosed with Stargardt’s disease. She described it as a genetic disease that creates holes in the retinas and impairs vision to the point of blindness. She said her vision has now deteriorated to 20/300 in her left eye and 20/400 in her right eye, and she sees a floating shadow caused by scar tissue. She can see light, color and shapes, but cannot distinguish details.
At this time, there is no cure for Stargardt’s disease.
Her vision has made orientation in large stadiums difficult, she said. But in general, it has not really affected her running.
In her book, Runyan described her aversion to the word “special.” As a child, she had to take the “special” bus for kids with disabilities to travel to school. She had to sit at the back of the classroom with a “special” closed-circuit television that took up the entire desktop and made a lot of noise.
“I don’t think of myself as anything ‘special,’” Runyan said. “I always say there’s a lot more I can accomplish. I don’t feel like I’m done yet.”
After a stint with the Paralympics, she qualified for the 1996 Olympic trials and broke the American record in the heptathlon 800.
In September 1996, Runyan moved to Eugene to train as a 1,500-meter runner under the tutelage of local track coach Dick Brown.
“I had seen her in the Olympic trials in the heptathlon 800,” Brown said. “Anyone could see the talent there.”
He said Runyan is a marvelous athlete.
“She took a career-ending problem and said, ‘It’s not going to screw me up,’” he said.
Brown began to teach her the physiology of running that would make her a better runner, but a series of injuries and surgeries prevented her from training.
Then, in the fall of 1998, a friend referred her to Matt Lonergan, a student massage therapist who worked at the Oregon Medical Lab, according to Runyan’s autobiography. She and Lonergan became best friends and partners in life.
“Matt was the one thing that kept me in it,” Runyan said. “But the way he kept me in it was almost as though we ran just for the sake of running. We didn’t run for the Olympics. We didn’t run for the Nationals. We went out and said, ‘Let’s go run on the trail because it’s fun to run on the trail.’”
Runyan wanted to train for the Olympics, she said in her book, and because she did not have a coach, Lonergan began training her.
“It seems like every year brings new challenges,” Lonergan said. “Every year it seems like something big happens, but it never goes exactly the way you want it. If you can get a year where nothing goes wrong, you’ve just got to hold on to that and not take it for granted.”
Through all her battles, she made the 2000 Olympic team.
Though she did not score as well as she wanted to in Sydney, Runyan said she does not regret taking the lead in the 1,500-meter race.
“I don’t think there was much I could’ve done that would have made the outcome any different for me,” she said. “I sure as hell would have had a lot more regret had I stayed in the back and had the pack made a move. I never would have caught up with them.”
In 2004, Runyan will be training for the Olympics, and she said her goal in the meantime is to gain more experience in cross country and road racing, and to work on her stamina and strength.
“We’ll take one thing at a time,” she said patiently.