Top blind and visually impaired runners from around the world head to Boston in June 2009 for the Vision 5K, one of the few races dedicated to disabled athletes.

The Vision 5K is a unique event where blind and sighted participants run or walk side by side. World-class blind runners, weekend walkers, and a partnership of four top blindness organizations come together to honor and promote the efforts of visually disabled people and those who serve them.

The 2009 Vision 5K takes place Sunday, June 7 at 9:30 AM at Boston College (140 Commonwealth Avenue, Main Gate) in Newton, Massachusetts. Runners can register online.
Vision 5K Awards Blind Runners Prize Money, US Championship

Few road races have a separate division for blind and visually impaired runners; fewer still award prize money. The Vision 5K puts blind athletes on a par with wheelchair and able-bodied participants in other races by enabling them to compete for recognition and a prize.

The United States Association of Blind Athletes (USABA) designates the Vision 5K as the US road race championship for the blind and visually impaired. The race awards $7,600 in prize money to the top five blind or visually impaired male and female finishers. Guides to top blind runners receive an honorarium.

Visually Impaired Division Prize Money Breakdown (Men & Women)

• 1st: $1,500
• 2nd: $1,000
• 3rd: $600
• 4th: $400
• 5th: $300

Guides to top finishers receive:

• 1st. ($250)
• 2nd. ($200)
• 3rd. ($150)
• 4th. ($100)
• 5th. ($50).

Eligibility for Vision 5K Visually Impaired Division

Entrants must be legally blind (i.e. impairment ranging from total blindness to visual acuity of 20/200 in the better eye with best correction, or a field of vision less than 20 degrees) to participate in the Visually Impaired Division. Certification may be required.
The Vision 5K Blindfold Challenge

One of the Vision 5K’s most popular attractions is the Blindfold Challenge, in which sighted runners don blindfolds and team up with sighted guides to experience the race as a blind person.

For many participants, accepting the Blindfold Challenge takes competition to a new level. Covering ones eyes uncovers how much guts and determination a person has: it frees runners to do things in a new way, and provides a glimpse of what’s possible.

As the Vision 5K website puts it, “You’ll understand what anyone with a vision impairment already knows: that being blind won’t hold you back, that you don’t need your eyes to see what’s inside you—that, in the end, fear is the only disability.”

In addition to the Visually Impaired Division and the Blindfold Challenge, the Vision 5K welcomes walkers, has a kids fun run, and is well known for its post-race amenities, including live music and a wide variety of food from local companies, including Legal Sea Foods and Cabot’s Ice Cream.

The race’s Visually Impaired Division is sponsored by the Carroll Center for the Blind, MAB (Massachusetts Association for the Blind) Community Services, the National Braille Press, and the Perkins School for the Blind.

Though originally designed as a race for elite blind runners, the Vision 5K has evolved into a major fundraiser and community event that unites hundreds of individuals, nonprofits, and corporations to celebrate and promote the accomplishments of the visually impaired. Call 617.732.0264 for more information.

The copyright of the article Vision 5K Road Race for the Blind in Accessible Recreation is owned by Andrew Leibs. Permission to republish Vision 5K Road Race for the Blind in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

posted on April 9, 2009

For low-vision students, cultivating their own relationships with classroom teachers and organizations that provide reading resources is what drives academic success.

Reading is the most difficult and time-consuming school task, yet is also how we discover and explore interests, develop our identity, and connect with the world. So it’s vital for students to know how to accomplish any reading task, regardless of deadline.

From long experience, I can tell you that when you’re legally blind (i.e. too much vision for braille, but still in need of help), literacy isn’t acquired, it’s built: you read using an internal triage system of cultivated resources that include: audio- and large-print books; e-texts, screen readers, magnification devices, personal readers, and other strategies that develop through awareness of one’s skills and needs.

Such a system could take one years to develop, as it did me, or could be outlined for a student in an hour or two.

Unfortunately special education doesn’t work this way. It shepherds rather than liberates. It’s hard to imagine a special education teacher saying, “Let’s take a morning and get you everything you need so you can get back to being a student.” Such independence might unloop that student from the cat’s cradle of coercion and compliance known as the I.E.P.

Fortunately, there is nothing special education provides that low vision students and parents can’t get on their own, usually for free, always more quickly and efficiently.

And it’s this getting, this surveying and connecting, that far beyond leveling the playing field, enables students to storm the heights: to develop a system that facilitates any reading task and fosters an identity-building spirit of exploration, confidence, and independence. Resource-conscious students get what they need immediately, are open to reading and learning opportunities beyond the I.E.P., and can easily increase academic performance while making the day-to-day management of classroom participation more efficient for teachers.

I remember the futility of my special education—peeking under a blindfold to distinguish braille dots. Braille and typing classes addressed none of my needs, but at my I.E.P meeting, the teachers told me quitting would mean no more books on tape. Five years of special education eroded my self-esteem, consumed precious time, diminished my enthusiasm for learning, and delayed for years the full development of my literacy.

The school’s justification (not without merit) was staying in a program would insure access to services and materials. The harm was not learning that I could access taped books, the most crucial component of my education, on my own.

At 17, almost by accident, I learned how to join Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. I went on to earn a Master’s degree, read thousands of books in a variety of formats, and devoted my first book, numerous articles, and an upcoming e-book to expanding low-vision literacy.

Despite my experience, I’m not against special education and know many adults (though none with low vision) who would never have become educated without it.

In the end, it’s not about me, or about debating the efficacy of special education, but simply asking, “What does my child need to succeed in school?”

If parents knew just how accessible the essential resources are, their child’s success, with or without special education, is all but guaranteed.

posted on April 1, 2009

Since 1988, the Paralympic Games have steadily achieved parity of prestige with the Olympics, completing disabled sports’ decades-long development from recreational therapy to a viable industry.

A funding gap, or chasm, persists, though as I write, I wear a pair of Air Jordans sent last summer by Paralympian April Holmes, whose foundation co-sponsored an essay contest with Jordan Brands. Later this year, I’ll compete in two 5Ks offering prize money for blind and visually impaired runners.

Programs are popping up, hence the need for disability sports conferences like the ones detailed here.

Developing Amazing Leaders Paralympic Conference

The 2009 Developing Amazing Leaders Paralympic Conference takes place the weekend of April 17-20 at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and offers opportunities for learning, networking, and inspiration from experts in the Paralympic movement. This conference is geared towards those running or wishing to start a Paralympic sport programs in their communities.

Workshop sessions provide hands-on experience with a variety of Paralympic sports, an in-depth dialogue about best practices, and a variety of sessions focused on working with injured military personnel. Call 719.866.4837 for information.

National Disability Sports Conference

The 2009 National Disability Sports Conference takes place September 10-12 at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia, about an hour north of Atlanta.

The conference will feature 30+ interactive sessions on topics such as coaching, recruitment, and program development led by top sports professionals, with elite coaches and Paralympic athletes sharing leading-edge techniques. Attendees will have access to one-on-one consulting on crucial program components, including fundraising, risk management, public relations, and grant writing.

Adaptive sports equipment, including wheelchairs, will be available to facilitate a hands-on learning experience.

“We really try to do hands-on workshops for coaches and program leaders so they can go home and be better coaches,” says program director Jeff Jones. “The work is geared towards developing athletes whose disabilities fall under the main Paralympic categories, including the blind and visually, those with spinal cord injuries, and amputees.”

Conference costs have not been set, though Jones estimates the price will be about $250 for the weekend event. Call Jeff Jones (770.850.9095) for more information.

posted on February 25, 2009

Running continues to be a growth area in accessible sports and recreation, especially for visually impaired runners, whose participation options range from United States Association of Blind Athletes (USABA) developmental sports camps to the Paralympics and include prestigious road races.

The Vision 5K, the US national championship 5K-road race for the blind and visually impaired, takes place Sunday, June 7 (9:30 AM) at Boston College in Newton, Massachusetts.

The race has a new course (the last two ran through Boston’s Back Bay), but still awards prize money to the top five visually impaired male and female finishers (and their sighted guides).

Another popular race feature is the Blindfold Challenge, where participants don blindfolds and pair up with sighted guides to experience what it’s like to run without sight.

The Vision 5K is sponsored by and is a major for a number of organizations that serve the blind, including the Carroll Center for the Blind (Newton, Mass.), the National Braille Press (Boston) and Vision Community Services (Boston).

Register online after March 1, 2009 or call 617.732.0264 for information.

Another 5K that offers prize money to elite blind runners is the Mark Lynn & Associates Stampede for VIPS, which takes place Saturday, August 29, 2009 in Louisville, Kentucky.

The race is a fundraiser for Visually Impaired Preschool Services (VIPS), based in Louisville.

This year’s location is not set. In past years, the race ran out and back under the lights of the Second Street Bridge connecting Louisville’s Waterfront Park with Jeffersonville, Ind. An Ironman triathlon scheduled the next day makes the Waterfront unavailable. Locations being considered include Churchill Downs and the Louisville Zoo. Call USABA coach Jim Vargo (502.452.8042) for more information.

posted on Feb. 10, 2009

My friend Julie York Coppens recently posted photos from Ski For Light’s 2009 International Week on Facebook. Those images reminded me how that program, which began in 1975, has come to epitomize accessible recreation’s broad range of benefits.

Ski For Light affords many disabled people their first taste of outdoor sports; it can reveal deep reserves of untapped competitiveness; it’s turned professed non-athletes into Paralympians, and gives nearly every participant, guides included, a new perspective on what’s possible.

I first attended Ski For Light in 2003, the last winter till this that New Hampshire lay under a deep covering of snow. In Alaska, however, it was so warm they had to dump trucked-in snow on the rainy streets of Anchorage to start the Iditarod. Each day at Russian Jack Springs Park, volunteers shoveled snow from the woods to maintain our icy tracks. We had only one full day of skiing.

But I was glad I went. I’d read about SFL for years, but wasn’t sold until veteran skier Annemarie Cooke described the palpable energy she’d feel entering the hotel dining room each night, filled with over 300 people, accomplished, competitive, caring, all creating a dynamic community, from curious guide dogs howling softly from under tables, to relationships and rivalries that build and change over the years, and most of all, people who are more than what they were for attending Ski for Light.

I met many, including Laura Oftedahl of Berkeley, Calif., who attended SFL in the early 1980s depressed and sedentary, and within four years had dropped 50 pounds, quit smoking, and won a gold medal in the world championships. And Amy Bower, an oceanographer from Falmouth, Mass., who found in Ski For Light a way to maintain her love of cross-country skiing and connect with a peer group of goal-achieving, blind professionals.

I, too, was transformed. Ski For Light breaks down barriers: it doesn’t matter that you are blind, or a first-time skier, veteran guide, or a top athlete. Everyone is equal; everyone moves forward at their own pace. At week’s end, most skiers enter the race/rally, a competition that, rather than separate athletes, brings them together.

Simultaneously calling out to one’s need for a comfort zone and competitiveness infuses Ski For Light with that rare inclusive energy that can change lives.

The 2009 Ski For Light International week took place at Soldier’s Hollow (near Provo, Utah) the Nordic ski venue for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. Ski For Light 2010 (January 31st through February 7th) will also take place there.

Last summer, my good friend Alan Ammann wanted to paint my portrait for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.

Alan’s request surprised me: he knows I catalogue our culture’s long history of sensationalizing albinism and he made no secret of wanting to explore the striking shades and contrasts of one of limited color.

I also worried that the top hat, a boxed antique he borrowed from the St. John’s Masonic Lodge in Portsmouth and wanted me to wear for some early digital shots, would distort my image—somewhere between British poet and heavy metal drummer.

I eventually warmed to the experience, however, as I did when Rick Guidotti photographed me for Positive Exposure. My nervousness ebbed with the growing sense of being captured and elevated into art.

Alan’s concept was amazing: his entry consists of two oil portraits and a hand-built viewer. When one looks at the paintings through the viewer, the images merge to form a 3-D, stereoscopic image much like that of an old Viewmaster toy.

Alan’s entry has already made the semifinals; portraits and viewer are being crated and sent on to the next round of judging. If it survives, it will be displayed this fall in the National Portrait Gallery’s triennial competition.

I hope Alan wins, though I already take my hat off to his artistic vision and skill.