|
For most people whorun a marathon, the toughest part of the race is the last few miles when pain and exhaustion test their will and physical limitations. For John Altan Kusku, it was the first few miles of the 2007 Detroit Free Press Marathon that were He recalls, "When the race started, I couldn't see. I just had a sort of sixth sense...hearing people around me. I ran down the streets of Detroit for the first 30 minutes purely by listening. I inadvertently bumped and nudged other runners about 50 times." John Altan is no stranger to these mishaps. He had to cancel his plans to run the same marathon in 2006 after he plowed into a concrete piling during a training run and severely injured his knee. But now the tenacious 25-year-old has his sights set - so to speak - on running the 2008 Boston Marathon, which he qualified for by running well in the Detroit race. John Alton was diagnosed with RP at the age of six, but that never stopped him from being athletic. "When I was a kid, I was always out playing hockey and football with friends," he says. "I wasn't always the best, because of my vision, but I got by." In eighth grade, he began attending the National Sports Education Camps Project (NSEC), which encourages kids with vision impairments to get involved in sports. It was there that he learned about goalball - a three-person team sport using a beeping ball. Goalball was originally developed for World War II veterans who had lost their vision. (Sighted people can play wearing a blindfold.) John Altan calls the sport "the love of his life" and participates in goalball tournaments across North America. A mathematics graduate student and teaching assistant at Western Michigan University, John Altan is working toward a career as a high school mathematics instructor. His mother, Julianne Kusku, began taking John Altan to local Foundation Fighting Blindness meetings in the Detroit area about 20 years ago. For the last 11 years, she helped organize a dinner and auction to raise money for the Foundation. Some of these events drew almost 300 people and raised as much as $75,000. A very proud mother, Julianne notes that John Altan was not only a good athlete and student, he played trumpet in marching bands during both high school and college. "A visiting music director, who didn't know John Altan was blind, once commented specifically on his impeccable marching alignment," she says. "He's a nice, well-rounded young man. He's got a lot going for him."
|
most challenging, because he had virtually no vision in the early morning darkness. Affected by advanced 