On
bronzed, muscled legs set off by rolled denim shorts, Marla Runyan strides
unhesitantly up to David, stopping directly in front of him, her face only
inches from his. Wrapping her long, slim fingers around his, she gently
lifts his hands until they are as high as the "USA Track and Field" logo
emblazoned across the front of her navy blue sweatshirt. In an absorbed,
quiet voice, she begins whispering softly, sounding her words distinctly,
syllable by syllable. As she speaks, her fingers are in constant, fluid
motion, like a baker kneading dough.
David cocks his head and lifts his large, slightly bulbous dark eyes in her direction, seemingly following her every intonation. To the uninitiated, they look like lovers enjoying a private tête-à-tête. In reality, though, they are virtual strangers, locked in a brief but intense relationship based on an unfortunate mutuality-- both suffer from severe physical handicaps.
Born without the ability to see or hear, the 32-year-old David's only contact with others is through "sign," the communications system based on finger movements that assures him, trapped in his dark, silent world, that there are others sympathetic to his plight.
Runyan is more than sympathetic; she is a fellow traveller. Although her blue eyes are focused unwaveringly on David's face, his features are little more than a blur. With vision officially measured at 20/300, Runyan is legally blind.
But, while David's world is rigidly limited, Runyan's is virtually unbound. Despite her handicap, she moves easily and successfully through two diverse spheres.
In one, where she meets people like David, she is a teacher for the blind and deaf. Armed with master's degree in education for those suffering from communicative disorders from San Diego State University, she is a champion for the handicapped on radio, tv, and in speeches before school boards and service clubs.
In the other, in which she moves with equal competence, she is a different kind of champion, a nationally ranked luminary in the heptathlon, a grueling athletic test that demands expertise in seven different track and field events ranging from the hurdles to the javelin toss.
Since she pursues
both vocations with equal vigor, it is difficult to tell career from hobby.
And, since both require tremendous amounts of concentration and dedication,
it is almost impossible to attempt both at the same time. For that reason,
Runyan had decided to apportion her time. Last summer she left her job
at a San Diego elementary school for the handicapped so she could devote
all her energies toward preparing for the most daunting athletic challenge
of her life: getting ready for the Atlanta Olympics. But before throwing
herself into a strict training regimen that will keep her busy at least
five days a week for the next 10 months, she agreed to attend a two-day
camp sponsored by the Coalition of Parents and Educators for the Deaf and
Blind. That is where she met David.
It is a lazy Saturday morning in late August at the Walker Creek Ranch, an educational facility 90 minutes north of San Francisco. As David and Runyan stand outside the cafeteria "discussing" what they will do for the next hour, the sun is making a welcome appearance through a light overcast.
"It's time for crafts," Runyan tells David with her fingers. "Would you like to do that?"
David laughs, emitting a loud, delighted bellow that he has never himself heard. "Yes," he replies in sign, nodding.
"What would you like to do?" Runyan asks.
David hesitates. "I think," he says, his fingers moving slowly, "that I'd like to build a house with clay and sticks."
"Okay," Runyan replies. Raising her hand, she taps it against her forehead. "I understand."
Placing his arm through hers, she fits his cane into his hand. "Come on, Summer," she says, reaching for the leash around the neck of her ever-present canine companion, a beautifully groomed, magnificently behaved golden retriever that she rescued from straydom a few years ago. Deliberately, the three of them wend down the path leading to the crafts room.
While David has his fingers deep in the mustard-colored clay, Runyan explains how, until she reached the fourth grade, her life was little different from that of any of her schoolmates growing up in Camarillo, a quiet bedroom community an hour's drive north of Los Angeles.
While her father once had ambitions to be a major league baseball player, Runyan's older brother showed no extraordinary athletic bent. And neither, at first, did Runyan, except for a fascination with soccer and gymnastics.
She was 9, she recalls, when she first noticed a problem with her eyesight: she couldn't read what the teacher was writing on the blackboard. After that, things rapidly got worse.
Her parents took her to specialist after specialist but it was two years before her condition was diagnosed as Stargardt's Disease, an inherited disorder (both her parents carry recessive genes for the malady even though neither of them suffers from it) that leads to irreversible deterioration of the retina. Although incurable, the disease stabilizes. By the time that happened, though, the 14-year-old Runyan was left with a huge hole in her vision; she could make out indistinct images on the periphery, but the center remained a confused, hazy clutter.
At first, because she was unable to read the texts, it appeared that she might have to drop out of Camarillo High. But a county service agency specializing in helping the physically handicapped came to the rescue with large-print books. She didn't realize it at the time, but staying at Camarillo High was a blessing; it allowed her to continue in the school's athletic program.
Up until the time her vision sank almost to zero, her sport of choice had been soccer. But she had to give it up because she could no longer see the black and white ball clearly enough to compete. Instead she took up track. It proved a fateful tradeoff.
Specializing in the high jump, she went on to post a distance of 5-feet-7 inches, which was enough to set a new school record but not enough to win her a track scholarship to college.
Undeterred, she enrolled at San Diego State University as a regular student and decided to try out for the Aztec track and field squad anyway. Easily convincing jump coach Gary Stathas that she had promise, she went on to post a distance of 5-9, which put her in second place in the event in the entire Western Athletic Conference. For two years, the high jump was all she did.
It was during her junior year that SDSU's running coach, Rahn Sheffield, now the schools' head track coach, began taking notice of her style and overall quickness; his intuition told him she was too talented to limit herself to one event. Impulsively, he asked her to run the 300 meters in a minor meet. "Just for fun" he told her.
He was shocked by the result. "She beat all my sprinters," Sheffield says today. "She looked to me like she was definitely more than a high jumper."
Runyan, however, was not so easily convinced.
"I told her she could do the hurdles," Sheffield says.
"Right!" she said scornfully. "Don't you know I'm blind?"
Up to that point, Sheffield says, and never again since, has her handicap been mentioned. Ignoring her cynicism, Sheffield persuaded her that her vision deficit was immaterial, that if she worked on her timing and concentration she could overcome the vision problem. From there, it was direct path from being a high jumper to a heptahtlete. But the journey was neither quick nor smooth, and it began not with physical training but psychological adjustment.
Before Sheffield could begin training her, he had to talk her into shedding some old, counterproductive habits. "She used to get away with a lot with the other coaches," Sheffield says with a chuckle. "She'd show up for practice whenever she felt like it and if anyone mentioned it to her, she'd get defensive. 'Don't hassle me,' she'd say."
But, as Runyan quickly learned, that was not Sheffield's method. "I'm pretty strict," he confesses. "I wasn't going to put up with that." One day she was late, and that was what Sheffield had been waiting for. "When I asked her for an explanation she said. 'I don't want to talk about it' and started to walk off." He grabbed her arm, he says, spun her around, telling her sternly that she wasn't going to do that with him. From then on, he says, she has followed his directions meticulously. That was almost four years ago and he is still her coach.
Because of her disability,
the classroom was almost as big a challenge as the athletic field. Unable
to read the texts, Runyan taped lectures, immersed herself in audio tapes
that accompanied some courses, and got help from others when the only choice
was to rely on books. She graduated cum laude and immediately signed up
for graduate school.
David grabs her hand, seeking her attention. "That's good," she tells him, holding his creation close to her face. "But it needs a little more work."
As David gropes for more material, Runyan glances over her shoulder to check on Summer, who is curled in a corner a few feet away, his head on his paws, watching.
"He goes everywhere with me," she says, explaining that she lives alone in an apartment in El Cajon, near San Diego. Thanks to a special optic device she is able to drive a car as long as it is a bright, sunlit day and she sticks to a few suburban routes that she knows well. She does not attempt heavy traffic and never drives at night or when its raining.
While being legally blind has forced her to adapt to a lifestyle most normally sighted persons would feel constricting, Runyan says her biggest adjustments have been in athletics.
In some ways, she is very typical of other athletes; in others -- mainly because of the alterations she has had to make because of her blindness -- she is very atypical.
Like many other athletes, she is a prisoner to routine. On the first day of a meet, she always arrives on the field precisely 75 minutes before the starting time of her first event, the 100-meter hurdles. For 15 minutes she jogs slowly around the infield, plugged in to Garth Brooks on her Sony Walkman. "It's always Garth Brooks," she says, sounding slightly embarrassed.
After her jog, she spends 30 minutes stretching, sometimes alone, sometimes with a trainer if one is available.
Then she devotes 10 minutes to limbering up her legs by doing long strides along the track.
She spends the final 20 minutes actually preparing for the event, setting up her starting blocks, running through the first couple of hurdles, getting herself psyched up for the coming demands on her body and mind.
Of the seven events she participates in, the hurdles is probably the one that required the most adjustment. It is eight steps to the first hurdle, then three steps between the remaining nine. Since her vision is so bad that she can't see from one to the next, she depends exclusively on timing and concentration.
At first, Sheffield says, she maneuvered by carefully counting the steps. But he felt that slowed her just a bit. So instead of counting, he works her on rhythm and timing. "I make sure she isn't counting," Sheffield says, "by talking to her during her workouts."
Ironically, the hurdles is also one of her better events. At the Olympic festival in Colorado Springs in July, 1995, she clocked a 13.79, which is 1.15 off the time set by a Greek woman who won the event in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.
In an heptathlon, the events follow a circumscribed order. Since they are so rigorous they are spread over two days, four on the first day, three on the second.
Following the hurdles is the high jump, which also requires extreme concentration on Runyan's part. The bar, which is twelve steps away, looks to Runyan like a faint, dark line, "a smudge." It is only after she is three steps into her approach that it begins to take definition. There also is the problem of background. If there is another horizontal object behind the bar, such as the top rail of one of the chain link fences that commonly surround tracks, she has trouble distinguishing between the two. If there are people moving around, it makes the situation worse. Sometimes, she admits, it is very difficult to maintain her concentration.
Mercifully, the high jump is followed by a virtual no-brainer, the 200-meter dash. "All I have to do there," she says, "is stay in my lane." Since her peripheral vision is better than her straight-ahead sight, she generally has little trouble. Although she cannot see the finish line for most of the race, she has learned that it is always in the same spot on the track so she can anticipate its appearance.
The last event of the first day is the shot put, one of Runyan's weaker events. Her best distance in the shot is 35-feet-4 inches, which she recorded at an heptathlon in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in August 1995. This, she confesses, is far short of the distances regularly logged by other athletes.
Recognizing the deficiencies in her throwing ability (her other soft spot is the javelin toss), Runyan had been taking special coaching from a San Diego couple -- event record holder Ramona Pagel and her husband, Kent. However, last fall the couple moved to Ohio, leaving her scrambling for a new advisor.
Sheffield attributes Runyan's throwing weaknesses to the fact that her poor vision has always hampered her development in that area; because she couldn't see, she didn't play pitch and catch during her formative years. "That's just something she missed out on. She's never developed those motor skills."
In the last year, however, she has increased her shot distance by at least five feet and her javelin by 20 feet.
The second day begins with the long jump (which also gives her problems because she has trouble seeing the line that marks the starting spot of the leap), followed by the javelin toss. The final event -- the 800-meter run -- is Runyan's strongest, the one that she hopes will propel her to an American record. At the Mt. SAC Invitational in Azusa, California, last April, Runyan posted a time of 2:08.80, which is not far off the current record of 2:06.97 held by fellow Californian Kym Carter. "It would be nice to break that," she says modestly.
Despite her so-so showing in the throwing events, Runyan is going into the Olympic trials (set for June 1996) with an enviable heptathlon total of 5,741 points. That is 141 points more than what she needed to assure her of an expense-paid trip to Atlanta and a certain berth in the event. There probably will be 18 women participating in the trials and the top three will go on to represent the United States in the Olympic heptathlon.
"It will be tough," Runyan concedes. Among the competitors will be veteran Olympian Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who compiled a record 7,291 points in the 1988 games in Seoul, Kym Carter, and Jamie McNeair of Buffalo, N.Y., who compiled 6,374 points at the Olymmpic Festival in Colorado Springs, enough to win the event's gold medal.
Runyan also came away from that same meet a major winner: she took the bronze medal, becoming the first disabled athlete ever to finish that high against sighted competition in the history of the Festival.
One of the things that pleases Runyan, is that no one patronizes her at the meets. Although officials and competitors help in little ways they do not make a point of treating her differently.
Sheffield recalls an official at one meet who helped Runyan find the shot when she had trouble locating it, and Runyan says other athletes invariably have been pleasant. However, she adds that she may not be surprised to see that change in Atlanta when the competition will be cutthroat.
Actually, Runyan will be going to Atlanta with two prospects: One is the chance of making the regular Olympics, the other is the certainty of being a participant in the Paralympics, the disabled-only event following the Olympics. In Barcelona, in 1992, Runyan won four gold medals in the Paralympics -- the 100, 200, 400 meters and the long jump.
But the difference between the Paralympics and the Olympics is like that between AAA baseball and the Bigs. Runyan is ambitious to go on to the major leagues.
"I want to know what my full potential is," she says earnestly. "I know I haven't reached it yet and I want to see what I can do."
In addition to the pressure she feels she is under to make the team, Runyan also needs to consider her age. She will be 27 1/2 years old by the time of the Atlanta games. Although Joyner-Kersee is in her 30s, Runyan knows that realistically her time for competitive athletics is running out.
"I've got another three good years," she says optimistically. "Right now, I see myself going through 1997 and the Track and Field World Championships in Athens, Greece."
And what if she doesn't make the cut in Atlanta? Will she be devastated?
"No," she says quickly. "Not at all. Even if I'm eliminated I have my goals for the year already set. I want to reach a 6,200-point total, and I'd like to break the women's record in the 800-meter run."
And teaching?
"I'll get back to it," she says brightly. There are no age constraints in the classroom.