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A Blind Man's Run Across America

This article is more than 7 years old.

One foot following the other, one step after the next for six million reps. That’s how Jason Romero did it for 60 straight days.

Romero didn’t let being blind stop him.

He didn’t let the physical pain of logging 50 miles a day on his spindly frame deter him from his goal of running from the beach in southern California to the steps of city hall in New York City.

The loneliness, the thoughts of abandonment that danced around his head, that is what nearly broke Romero.

“There were points — five, six times a day — that I wanted to quit,” Romero said.

“This is stupid. It doesn’t matter,” he’d say to himself.

As the sun set on New York City on May 23, the 46-year-old reached his goal. He climbed the steps of city hall and became the first legally blind person to run across the country. He clocked the seventh-fastest time ever among those with or without sight.

In eighth grade at Hamilton Middle School in Denver, Romero went to the nurse’s office for a routine eye check. He couldn’t read the chart. The nurse immediately sent him to the eye doctor. It didn’t go well.

Romero remembers the visit like this: “Basically your life is over. You’re going to go blind. Most blind people don’t work. Forget about college. Forget about your dreams. And learn to do stuff with your hands.” The doctor abruptly finished the monologue, telling Romero he had to move on to the next patient.

Romero’s mother, the woman working three jobs to raise Romero and his older brother, burst into tears in the doctor’s parking lot. It was the first time he saw her cry.

The doctor had discovered Romero had retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disorder that causes the gradual loss of sight. Today, if you looked through the tubes inside a roll of paper towels, you’d have the same field of vision as Romero, but his sight will keep degenerating.

Back when he was first diagnosed, it gave Romero an explanation, a small sense of relief. He had thought everybody else saw things just like him. Now, he didn’t need to wonder anymore about why he was the only one of his friends who always ran into trees at night and felt the thwack of low hanging branches. The teacher’s writing on the blackboard? That became a lot clearer when he took his new seat in the front row and wore those thick grandma-style magnifying glasses to high school.

“You need to adapt. It was a great skill I developed as a result of my eyes,” he said.

He became a lawyer. He worked for General Electric and Western Union. He married. They had three kids. Then he had to adapt again.

His marriage ended in divorce. He is “involuntarily retired.” The loss of sight took his driver’s license away a couple years ago.

The idea to run across the country wasn’t on some bucket list. It came to Romero at a low point. It came to him as something he knew he was going to do, not something he had to do. He felt the chills. He texted his mom. He had to tell someone or he’d risk it being one of those fleeting, unfulfilled dreams. Fifteen seconds later she texted him back: I’m in.

Off they went, making a plan. For more than a year, Romero ran ridiculously long races to prepare for an even more ridiculously long run. He ran the Key 100 in Florida, the Badwater 135 in California. He ran a 183-mile race across Puerto Rico. He competed at the Paralympic World Marathon Championships. He went to Greece for the 153-mile Spartathlon. He and his mother planned the U.S. route, looking for the most direct path because winding roads would only add more difficulty to a blind run.

With a seashell in his hand from the Pacific Ocean and with a pair of wide-sized Hoka Bondis on his feet, he left Santa Monica Pier on March 24. Within eight days he had run through the shoes Hoka had given him.

Normally, Romero could get 1,000 miles out of the sneakers, but the cambered, sloped surface coupled with the inordinate amount of foot scraping left him logging 100 to 150 miles before he need a new pair. No problem, though.

“I’ve had a lifetime of having to adapt, to understand that you always need to be amorphous. You need to understand change is the only thing you can actually depend on.”

He spent 90 minutes one morning ordering pairs off the internet from various retailers and having them shipped ahead on his route.

Three weeks in, Romero adapted to the physical pain. It was there and it wasn’t going away, but it couldn’t get any worse, so he’d manage it.

He’d wake each morning at 5 a.m. and everything hurt. He’d ice his feet, stretch, rub his legs. He’d be on the road by 6:30 a.m., hobbling, stopping, stretching and hobbling some more. After three hours he’d start to shuffle. Right around midday he’d be in a full run. “If you saw me after six hours, you’d be like, ‘This guy is fresh, he hasn’t even ran anything.’”

He figured the only way he could be physically stopped is if he got hit by a car or broke a bone in his foot.

His mother drove the route in a minivan, giving her son about 200 calories of food four times every hour on the go.

Romero thought about his whole life. Inevitably replayed his failures. The failed marriage. The failed promise he made to himself that when his parents got divorced, he’d never do that. The failure this was to his children. “Those were the dark points.”

Doubt crept in. Romero calls it “the devil of doubt.” Those thoughts telling him he could take a day off. He had run enough. No one would be any less inspired if he stopped. He could quit. After all, this wasn’t a race. It was a run. He had already proven something by trying.

As Romero kept putting one foot in front of the other, he realized in those failures he had given his best and life happened. The Catholic-raised, non-denominational Christian believes the run was a calling from God and his faith in that kept him going, step-by-step through the doubt and the loneliness.

Romero at the finish in New York City (Photo courtesy of Jason Romero).

After he finished in New York City, he went to Battery Park. He took the seashell he had grabbed from the Pacific and threw it in the Hudson River, a symbolic completion of the cross-country trek.

“Hopefully, this is an example that a challenge never has to stop you. There’s no type of adversity that can overcome the human spirit. There’s no limits to it.”

Romero has already conducted a few public speaking engagements about the run. He doesn’t want to focus only on the achievement. He wants people to know about the pitfalls, too, the entire journey.

“There’s a message there. There’s something larger about this. I’m going to speak about it and I’m going to share it.”

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