No Finish Line: My Life As I See It

. A Matter of Perception

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.