There are many athletes with disabilities who perform exceptionally well at the Paralympics. But aside from four gold medals at the 1992 Barcelona Paralympic Games, Marla Runyan won the 1500 meters at the Pan American Games in 1999, finished eighth over the same distance at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, and won the United States 5000 meters three times in a row in 2001, 2002, and 2003. Runyan is legally blind — she can see the feet and the colors of her competitors’ jerseys and the red surface of the running track, but she can’t see the finish line. In her autobiography, No Finish Line: My Life As I See It, she explains: “When I run a race, I don’t always know whether I’ve won or lost. I can’t see the clocks, or the lap counters, or the scoreboards. I only know that the finish is at the end of the straightaway.”
At the age of eight, she noticed a blob before her eyes. One day, her teacher called Runyan’s mother and told her to have Runyan’s eyes checked because she could only read if her books were no more than a few inches from her face. Over the next few months, Runyan’s mother took her from one doctor to another. One said it must be psychosomatic, and her mother and father stayed up all night desperately trying to work out whether it was their parenting that was causing the problem. Then, they went to a nutritionist who advised Runyan to stop eating Rice Krispies and drinking 7UP. But changing her diet did not help.
A retina specialist finally diagnosed her with Stargardt disease.
At school, she discovered the joys of running. When she was outdoors and running, she no longer felt blind. She felt like the fastest girl in the world. She even tried her hand at the high jump despite the fact that she couldn’t see the bar.
For Runyan, her disability was an incentive. She was the top student in her school and was even invited to give a valedictory address during her school’s graduation ceremony. She chose to speak about setting goals. Other people react to life’s challenges with despair and frustration — and Runyan was also often desperate. But for her, she harnessed her desperation and adopted an attitude of “I’m gonna show them!” In her autobiography, she remembers: “The more my eyes betrayed me, the more determined I was to become an academic overachiever, and an athletic one, and a musical one, all at the same time. I had to prove that I wasn’t dumb and that I could do all the things that came naturally to others.”
Runyan had tremendous strength and worked incredibly hard, drawing on her unbending will to overcome her difficulties. As a result, she found it hard to understand her nondisabled classmates. She often wondered what they could achieve if they had the same strength, energy, and perseverance as she did, a justified question. She wrote: “I could not understand how some of my fellow students could be so lackadaisical about their work; about assignments that were incredibly time-consuming for me. Why didn’t they use their vision to the fullest? It seemed to me that they were wasting perfectly good eyes. At times, the feeling was alienating.”
From the perspective of a person who expends so much energy on doing even the smallest things, it seems incomprehensible that people without disabilities do not make the most of their inherent skills. “If I had your eyes,” she sometimes thought, “I would not only know what is on the board, I would get an A in this class.”
If you, dear reader, are not living with a disability and are reading these stories of people who, with tremendous willpower and determination, have achieved the exceptional despite their disabilities, don’t you ask yourself: “What could I achieve if I only exhibited the same persistence, determination, and willpower?”
Runyan spent years trying to hide her disability from others. One reason she did so was that she did not want to use her blindness as an excuse. Whenever she couldn’t do something, she never said, “It’s because I can’t see.”
This is what sets winners and losers apart. Losers always look to external conditions and unchangeable circumstances as the causes of their defeats. On the one hand, this provides them with a good excuse, but it also makes them helpless. Winners look inside themselves for the causes of their setbacks. As Runyan puts it: “If the cause of failure was not my eyesight, then it had to be a deficit in my effort or skill. I told myself to work harder, and I was intensely critical of the final product.” So, do what Runyan did. Stop looking for the causes of your difficulties and defeats in the world around you, in other people, in the color of your skin, or in your parents’ backgrounds.
Don’t be a victim — shape your own destiny.
Rainer Zitelmann is a historian and sociologist. He is also a successful businessman, real estate investor, and world-renowned author of 24 books, including The Rich in Public Opinion.
