Tag: blind

Tevin Price is quick to refer to September’s Three Sisters Marathon in Danville, Va., as having been his first 26.2-mile race, and is matter-of-fact in labeling Saturday’s Novant Health Charlotte Marathon as his second.

But the 32-year-old Charlottean is also willing to admit that his most recent adventures in long-distance running are a bit more complicated than that.

If there’s an asterisk next to his marathon debut, here’s a brief explanation:

On Sept. 6, Price was navigating the Three Sisters course with his running partner Isa Moore — also a first-time marathoner — and doing well through 20 miles. The temp had already topped 80 degrees, though, with a high dew point to boot, and over the next few miles both men started to fall apart. Moore slowed down significantly, as his leg muscles cramped. Price, meanwhile, was struggling against the heat, but didn’t want to fall too far off of his goal pace. And although he knows now he should have hydrated more and pushed himself less, in the moment, he decided to leave Moore behind.

Which was probably always going to be a bad idea, because in addition to running as Price’s friend, Moore was also serving as a guide runner for Price — who is legally blind.

Price never made it to the finish line.

Instead, he lost track of where he was, then became so overheated that he wound up in an ambulance, felled by dehydration and the early stages of a type of heat-induced muscle damage called rhabdomyolysis. It left him badly shaken. “The Danville thing, if I’m being honest, that was scary,” Price says. “Hey man, we’re not getting paid to do this. Like, nothing is worth that.”

Why, then, just 10 weeks after his cut-short attempt to finish his first marathon included a visit to the hospital, is he so excited to so quickly try again?

‘It’s pretty much a blur’

Price was born with microphthalmia-coloboma, a pair of related congenital eye malformations.

He doesn’t have a working right eye, while the vision in his left eye, he says, is such that everything appears to him as it would appear to a normally sighted person if they were looking through the opposite end of a telescope.

Asked for more detail about his level of visual impairment during an interview in a conference room at Novant Health Mint Hill Medical Center (he works for Novant Health as an internal mobility specialist — essentially a career advisor), Price looks toward artwork on the opposite wall about 25 feet away and explains: “So there are posters on the other end of this table … on the wall. They look really small. I can’t tell you anything on those posters, but I know that they’re posters. I think there’s a triangle in the center, but I don’t really know what it is.” (They’re hands in the shape of a heart.)

“Now, if I get closer … I can describe it a little bit more.”

To get closer to artwork in an office, though, he can take his time and proceed cautiously. Running — a sport he took up in earnest just a year and a half ago, after gentle but persistent nudging from his mom, an amateur endurance athlete herself — is a different beast. “Because everything kind of enlarges as I come up on it,” he says. And since he comes up on things so much faster at, say, a sub-9-minute running pace, “it’s pretty much a blur.”

In his own neighborhood, Price is able to run by himself in good daylight, since he knows every inch of the streets around the house he shares with his wife, Kayla.

But once he decided to step out of his comfort zone by joining Charlotte’s popular Mad Miles Run Club and signing up for longer-distance races, he knew he’d have to step outside of it even more by asking for an assist.

And he’s off to the races

From childhood into young adulthood, Price prided himself on his ability to be independent, sometimes to the point of stubbornness.

Only after graduating from UNC Charlotte and launching into a human-resources career that revolves around helping people pursue professional goals — first at Winston-Salem Industries for the Blind (which would later become IFB Solutions) and now at Novant, where he also co-leads the company’s Persons with Disabilities Business Resource Group — did he come to understand that it was also OK for him to accept help in pursuing his own goals.

So he showed up for his first Mad Miles group run with a waist tether and a favor to ask.

“Hey, would anyone here mind guiding me?”

No one there had any experience. But he laid it all out in simple terms:

• I’m visually impaired but not totally blind.
• This is basically a band that connects on one end around my waist and on the other around the waist of whoever is willing to guide me.
• As we run, I need verbal cues, like if there’s elevation change, a speed bump, stuff like that.
• We’ll need to take it slow at first, but as we get comfortable we’ll be able to speed up more. This should be pretty low-maintenance overall.

Someone stepped forward and said, Sure, I’ll help you out. “The rest,” Price says, “is history.”

He ran his first guided race in September 2024, at the Around the Crown 10K; completed the Novant Health Charlotte Half Marathon last November in 1 hour, 50 minutes and 30 seconds (an 8:26-per-mile pace); connected with Isa Moore for last year’s Charlotte Turkey Trot and switched to a hand tether, which has a longer learning curve but offers increased guide control in crowded races; and since has run three more half marathons.

Along the way this year, Price set his sights on the Three Sisters race in Virginia because he’d gotten it in his head that he wanted to run the Boston Marathon — and Three Sisters was one of the last events where runners could qualify for the 2026 edition of the storied New England race, before the window closed.

Runners with visual impairment can qualify for Boston by finishing in under five hours. His half-marathon times suggested he could run a roughly four-hour marathon, on proper training, in favorable weather.

Welp…

‘Just get out and do it’

After the frightening episode in Danville, Price submitted to an evaluation at Novant Health Heart & Vascular Institute in Mint Hill. There was at least a little concern that his body’s breakdown was more serious than a one-off heat illness.

But doctors there gave him the green light to try again.

So he immediately turned his attention to Saturday’s Charlotte Marathon — which he had signed up for prior to doing Three Sisters, with other visually impaired friends. It just now is going to be his first full marathon instead of his second (although he still would probably argue that the September race should symbolically count as his first, if not officially).

Oh, and another thing: Isa Moore will run with him again; but this time, they’ll be joined by a second guide named Christina DePriest, who has guided Price in shorter races and has a much longer résumé than Moore as a marathon pacer.

On Tuesday of this week, Price and DePriest met before a Mad Miles club event at Camp North End for a chilly shakeout run, and the conversation again turned to his troubles in Virginia.

“Until mile 20, I was perfect,” Price recalled. “I felt like I hadn’t run anything. Then it just got real hot. It was terrible. And I knew I had left Isa. So I was on a highway just by myself. Then I got on the main street and — I mean, it was like those movies, when somebody’s in a desert and they’re hallucinating. That’s how I felt … before I blacked out.”

“You let go of the tether, though!,” DePriest exclaims.

“I let go of the tether,” Price admits, flashing a perfect blend of arrogance and sheepishness. “I said, ‘I’mma just go.’”

“Well,” DePriest responds, with a laugh, “I cannot outrun you in a 5k, but I can outrun you in a marathon at least for now, so you will not get away from me.”

Then she adds, confidently: “I will keep things under control.”

He smiles. He knows he’ll need her to do that on Saturday as they traverse the rolling Charlotte course in not-as-bad-but-still-unseasonably-warm weather. Pushing too much and drinking too few fluids in Danville, he says, “taught me to respect the fact that this is a sport, and respect the fact that there’s a lot of little, small things that go into doing this sport that you have to be mindful of.”

And even though that experience was not just humbling but frightening, he’s much more afraid of being the type of person who says “I can’t.”

“Before I started (running longer distances), I’d be like, ‘Oh, I can’t do that.’ ‘Oh, I can’t do this,’” Price says. “I still find myself saying, ‘I can’t do that’ and ‘I can’t do this.’” But he’s learned that, when he’s training for a big race, “I can’t keep saying ‘I can’t’” — or he won’t be ready for it. “And I don’t want other people to say it. That’s a big reason why I run, to inspire people to get outside the house. To show people that they can. They don’t have to have a disability. They can be anybody. And they can walk. I don’t care. Just get out and do it. …

“So yeah, what happened in Danville is not gonna be something that breaks me. It’s just gonna make it even sweeter when I do finish.”