Hi, I’m Brooke.
I’m a junior at the Branson School in Ross, California. I play varsity soccer, run varsity track, and I’m happiest when I’m outside and moving.
This blog is about a project that’s kind of taken over my life — in a good way. It started with something I noticed, turned into something I couldn’t stop thinking about, and now it’s the thing I work on every chance I get.
The short version
I’m trying to figure out how to help visually impaired runners train independently — without needing a human guide every time they want to go for a run. And I’m looking to nature for answers, because it turns out animals solved most of these problems a long time ago.
How I got here
I’ve been obsessed with biomimetics — basically, stealing good ideas from nature — since I discovered the concept the summer after my freshman year. It clicked immediately: instead of inventing solutions from scratch, you look at how evolution already solved the same problem over millions of years, and you translate that into something humans can use.
That interest led me taking online courses about biomimetics, to a summer research position at UCSB, where I spent four weeks studying how dolphins arrange themselves in pods to save energy. They’re not doing math out there — they’re sensing pressure changes in the water and adjusting instinctively. The intelligence isn’t in their heads. It’s in their bodies, in the way they interact with the water around them.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that idea — that you can move fast through a complex environment by feeling your surroundings rather than analyzing them — would become the foundation of this entire project.
The moment it clicked
After UCSB, I was at my local track and I saw a visually impaired runner training with a guide. The guide was calling out everything — curves, other runners, distance to the next water station. The runner was clearly fast, clearly strong. But every single stride depended on someone else’s voice.
I run track. I know what it feels like when running gets easy — when your brain just turns off and your body takes over. That runner doesn’t get that. Ever. Their brain is maxed out the entire time, just trying to stay safe.
And I kept thinking about the dolphins. About the fish I’d been reading about, with their lateral line systems that sense pressure changes along their whole body. These animals don’t need to identify what’s around them. They just need to know where they are relative to the edges. That’s a completely different — and much simpler — problem.
I started digging in. I found that somewhere around 150–200 million working-age adults with low vision don’t meet basic physical activity guidelines. I found that almost every assistive device out there was built for walking, not running. And I found that nobody was really asking the question that seemed obvious to me: what if the biggest barrier to running isn’t obstacles — it’s the mental exhaustion of dealing with them?
What I’m actually building
I call the core concept the Stress Wall. It’s the point where the mental effort of staying safe while running gets so high that the run just isn’t worth it anymore. Sighted runners push past that threshold into flow. Visually impaired runners slam into it.
I think the way to push that wall back is to borrow from nature. Fish don’t identify objects — they feel gradients. Bats don’t echolocate constantly — they ramp up their sonar only when things get uncertain. Insects don’t recognize landmarks — they balance motion across their visual field to stay centered.
These systems are all lightweight, adaptive, and quiet when nothing interesting is happening. That’s the design philosophy I’m working with: not a device that talks at you constantly, but something closer to a new sense — one that only speaks up when it matters.
Why “Run Like a Fish”
The lateral line is a strip of sensors that runs along a fish’s body and detects changes in water pressure. It doesn’t tell the fish what’s nearby. It tells the fish where it is relative to boundaries — walls, currents, other fish.
“Am I centered?” is a much easier question than “What is that object?” If we can give a runner the equivalent of a lateral line, we might not need to solve the whole problem. We just need to help them feel the edges of their path.
Also, I spent a summer thinking about dolphins, and the project is about running. Fish felt right.
Where I am now
I’ve written two white papers: one on the Stress Wall concept and the biomimetic design principles behind it, and a second one surveying every major assistive technology out there and identifying what’s missing.
Every weekend, I volunteer as a guide runner with Achilles International in San Francisco. That community is the reason this project has a pulse. The runners I train with — Jisselle, Angela, Lucas, and others — have shaped every idea in this blog through their honesty and their willingness to let me ask a lot of questions. I took a design thinking course at Dartmouth that drilled one thing into me: start with the people, not the technology. I try to live that.
I’m also a Student Researcher with Bionic Project Inc. an organization that dismantles disability bias through education, story, and sport. They helped inspired me when they came to visit my school my freshman year. Their mission to educate students to build a more inclusive future just makes sense. Beyond the research, I’m helping them build curriculum for their school seminars so that other students can learn about inclusive design — ideally earlier than I did.
What’s next
Phase I (where I am now) — Research, interviews, white papers, and building a network of runners and advisors.
Phase II — Turning what I’ve learned into actual design specs for a prototype, starting with predictable environments like tracks and park loops.
Phase III — Building something real and testing it with real runners in real conditions.
I’m a high schooler. I’m not going to solve this overnight. But I’ve spent the last two years learning that nature’s best solutions are usually simpler than anyone expected — and I think there’s something useful in that for this problem too.
Get involved
If you’re a visually impaired runner, a guide, a researcher, an engineer, or someone who just thinks this is interesting — I’d genuinely love to hear from you. I’m building a community around this project, and more perspectives make it better.
You can email me at brooke@runlikeafish.blog.
And if you’re a student wondering whether you’re “qualified” to do something like this — you’re not. Neither was I. Do it anyway.