Today I ran as a guide in the 5K at San Francisco Marathon weekend. I hadn’t had the chance to do a training run with my runner beforehand, so I showed up a little nervous — this was my first time guiding him, and my first time guiding in an actual race at all.
I met my runner, a 16-year-old from the East Bay, and his parents right in front of the Ferry Building. We were running as part of Achilles International, in the bright yellow Achilles shirts, with two guides per runner. We swapped off — one of us holding the tether, the other running just ahead as a blocker, calling out “blind runner coming through, please make room.”
The start line was packed and loud, honestly a little overwhelming even for me. Visually impaired runners and their guides get to line up at the front, which helped, but I kept thinking about how much louder and more chaotic it must have felt from his side of the tether. So I narrated — what was around us, who was cheering, where the course bent — partly so he could take it in, and partly to help him relax into it.
Every runner around us was respectful and made space without being asked twice. And people cheered for the yellow shirts — “Go Achilles!” — the whole way.
We weren’t fast. We didn’t need to be. We finished, he got his medal, and he was grinning the entire way to meet his parents at the finish line. I thanked him for trusting me to guide him. It’s a strange kind of trust — someone letting you be their eyes for 3.1 miles through a crowd of strangers — and I don’t think I understood what that meant until I was actually holding the other end of the tether.
This is the kind of thing this whole project keeps coming back to: the gap between building a good feedback system on paper and understanding, in your body, what it’s like to move through the world without seeing it. Today wasn’t research. It was just running next to someone who trusted me. But I don’t think I’ll design the same way after it.
This post is part of an ongoing research series at runlikeafish.blog exploring biomimetic approaches to assistive technology for visually impaired runners. If you’re a visually impaired runner, a guide, or a researcher working in this space, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at brooke@runlikeafish.blog