On a recent morning, two men were running side by side in Central Park when one of them collided with a woman as he passed her. The woman was briefly furious, but her face softened once she saw the strap connecting the men at the waist.
Francesco Magisano, the man who stumbled upon her, is blind, and his guide Nev Schulman nervously apologized for the accident. The men were running together for the first time in preparation for the New York City Marathon on Sunday.
Magisano, who was diagnosed with a rare eye cancer as a baby and lost his vision as a teenager, will be among more than 500 runners with disabilities and guides participating in this year’s race.
Marathons are physically and emotionally challenging, but the New York City Marathon has a unique set of difficulties for blind runners and their guides. The large number of spectators and screaming runners (race officials expect approximately 50,000 finishers this year) makes it difficult for guides to lead blind runners along the tight 26.2-mile course.
So in Central Park, Magisano, 28, and Schulman, 39, were trying to prepare as best they could.
“Which side do you prefer?” Schulman asked Magisano before running as they stood near the Central Park entrance at West 100th Street and Central Park West.
“I brush my teeth with my right hand, so I have my guides on the right side,” Magisano joked.
With the leash secured around their waists and Magisano’s right hand resting on his handler’s left shoulder, the pair walked toward the trail.
“They’ve already started preparing for the finish line,” Schulman noted shortly after they began running. (The race, which passes through all the city’s boroughs, begins in Staten Island and ends in Central Park in Manhattan.)
“So there are already bleachers on the left,” Schulman added, giving Magisano an idea of the scene.
Magisano was diagnosed with retinoblastoma when he was 10 months old. She had always had low vision, but it wasn’t until ninth grade that she completely lost it over a three-week period.
“I walked home from school every day and saw the lines on the street a little more blurred,” he said.
He didn’t start running until much later, in 2017, after an unexpected conversation at a grocery store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He was standing with his cane in front of a pile of bell peppers, a useful food, he said, because it can be eaten raw. Then an older man patted him on the shoulder.
“Do you run?” Magisano remembered the man asking him. The man then told him about Achilles, a group of runners with disabilities who met twice a week to run in Central Park.
“I’ve always been interested in trying new things; I’ve never run before in my life,” Magisano said. That week he went running with the group. Shortly after he signed up for his first marathon.
He now works as director of Achilles chapters in the New York City metropolitan region, and Sunday will be his sixth time running the New York City Marathon. His goal is to run at a pace of 3 hours and 30 minutes, which is approximately eight minutes per mile. Earlier this year, he completed a 321.6-mile triathlon (swim, run and bike) over three days in Florida.
Visually impaired runners can have a maximum of two guides at the New York City Marathon. Guides do not have to pay a registration fee, do not receive scoring, and do not receive an official finishing time. They must wear a guide bib and will not be able to push or pull the runner forward. according to the guidelines of the New York Road Runners, which organizes the marathon.
Magisano will run with two guides. One will make sure to eat and drink enough throughout the race. He likes to run with a new guide and with someone he has run with before.
“That keeps it interesting,” Magisano said. He told Schulman, “You’re the newest one, which means you’re the fun one.”
Schulman is the producer and host of MTV’s “Catfish,” a reality show about whether people who meet online are really who they say they are. He chose to guide this year because he wanted his seventh time running the New York City Marathon to be different. He recalled how his pace in his first marathon was slower than he expected and how he became progressively slower as the race progressed.
“I hear from behind: ‘Blind runner! Blind runner to your right!’ and two guides who were leading what I guess was a woman in her 50s and they actually flew past me,” Schulman said. That humiliated him and he knew that one day she would like to be a guide.
As Schulman told the story, a group of runners ahead of them, upon hearing the phrase “blind runner,” separated to make way for him and Magisano, assuming he was speaking to them.
But one woman, apparently mesmerized by how a ray of sunlight landed on a nearby tree, stopped in the middle of the road to take a photo. Schulman gently grabbed Magisano’s elbow and moved her own body to her right to guide him around her.
Guiding, Schulman said, would add a new level of satisfaction to the marathon. He said his goal was to “just successfully navigate the course without incident, just get Francesco and me to the finish line.”
The woman who took the photo was not the only obstacle to overcome. Schulman also made calculations about how to navigate around people they would soon catch up with or who were approaching them. He kept an eye out for pedestrians and cyclists trying to cross from one side of the road to the other. At one point, Schulman told Magisano to duck to avoid a low branch.
It was good practice.
“A lot of times, it’s hard to listen to my guides, so there will be minutes where I can’t hear a word they say, so you have to go completely by your feelings,” Magisano said of the City Marathon course. from New York. . He said he focused on the feel of his guides’ elbows and knees.
“You can’t really see it, but the hair on our arms is like the ponytails in ‘Avatar,'” Schulman said. “They’re synchronizing enough that we can create a bond.”
Magisano, who laughs quickly, looks for reassurance in his guides, people with whom he can joke. He appreciates those guides who lead with confidence, express their opinion, and speak their minds.
And as much as the guides help Magisano, he also does his part as a guide. He prefers not to run on the lines painted on the street, which can make the path uneven, so he reminds the guides to get him off of them. He asks them to tell him what pace they are running and how many kilometers they have completed. Above all, he also ensures his safety.
Magisano said it was common for guides to forget to eat and drink, which could be dangerous given the pace and distance they run during marathons.
“They are so focused on guiding that it will be like two hours and they won’t have eaten,” he said.
Magisano has trained hundreds of guides and Aquiles is always looking for more. He joked that before he started running, his exercise was writing essays on the history of football. He now does real physical exercise and has built a solid community of friends. And of course, there are life lessons to be learned from running a marathon.
“You have to fight and feel pain,” Magisano said. “That kind of relationship with disability is where life is a struggle, but you have to overcome it, otherwise you will fail.”
