Simon Wheatcroft refuses to quit. Legally blind since age seventeen he still remembers the day he planned to take his girlfriend up a mountain and propose. "We started out and we got lost, which stumped me because my girlfriend can see and, you know, it's a mountain," he said, speaking at WIRED 2014. "I still struggle with that today." But as rain made the unstable terrain even more dangerous they decided that they had to turn back. This may have been the smart decision Wheatcroft admits, but from then on he vowed never to give up again.
First though, he needed a challenge. "I was sat on my sofa and thought, how can I go out there and push boundaries? So I went out to my local football field with the only pair of shoes I had and started running between the goalposts." Using Runkeeper, which gave audio feedback on distance and pace he managed to run a mile.
Even on this football field though, things were getting dangerous. "It was the dogwalkers," Wheatcroft said. "They presumed I could see. I presumed they would move." So his wife drove him to a closed-off road nearby. By feeling the double yellow lines beneath his feet Wheatcroft could keep himself on track, and he started thinking about what he could achieve mixing this tactile feedback with Runkeeper's audio information.
So he decided to run out alongside an active dual carriageway. "
I just told myself that the cars would move," he said, and thankfully this time they did. "When I got to the end, I just cried, I couldn't believe I'd achieved this -- I was running," he said, "and I knew one thing -- I needed to get back to the closed road before my wife found out"
For the next few weeks he ran the open road, relying on pavement camber and grass banks to keep himself in line. "The obvious problem was road signs and lampposts - you have to learn where they are by running into them, Wheatcroft said. "Once you've done that you don't forget. Unfortunately traffic cones are an unfortunate height, and people move those."
After a several weeks he reached ten miles, ten times as much as on the football pitch. That number stuck in his head -- perhaps too much -- and he went straight home and, in the same week that his son was born and he started university, Wheatcroft signed up for a 100 mile race. He had six months to train.
Unfortunately the race took place in a hilly part of the Cotswolds, and as Wheatcroft points out he couldn't exactly see the elevation map. "I got 50 miles and broke down," he said. "The emotional fatigue was insane. But I couldn't quit. I never wanted to quit again. I decided the only way to fail is if I couldn't stand. Thirty miles later, I couldn't stand and I was removed from the race."
Nevertheless he'd run eighty miles, up from one mile barely a year ago. Next week, with the help of Google Glass, and social media he plans to run from Boston to New York alone, and then run the New York marathon. "That's what's possible right now," he said. "But what really interests me is what's possible next year and the year after that. I've never actually competed solo, and if there's one place a man can run alone it's the desert. The idea now is to run across the Sahara, compete against sighted people and see if I can beat them."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
