Recently, two men were running side by side in Central Park when one of them collided with a woman as they passed by. The woman became momentarily furious, but her expression softened when she saw the rope that connected the men at the waist. Francesco Magisano, the man who had collided with her, is visually impaired, 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, which took place on Sunday, November 5th.
Magisano, who was diagnosed with a rare eye cancer as a baby and lost his vision as a teenager, was among the more than 500 disabled runners and guides who participated in this year’s race. Marathons are physical and emotional challenges, but the New York City Marathon presents a unique set of difficulties for blind runners and their guides. The large number of spectators and shouting runners—officials expected nearly 50,000 finishers this year—makes it difficult for guides to navigate blind runners along the crowded 42-kilometer course.
That’s why Magisano, 28, and Schulman, 39, were trying to prepare as best they could in Central Park. “Which side do you prefer?” Schulman asked Magisano, standing near the entrance of Central Park on 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 rope secured around their waists and Magisano’s right hand resting on his guide’s left shoulder, the duo began walking towards the route. “They’ve already started setting up the finish line,” Schulman noted shortly after they started running. (The race, which passes through all five boroughs of the city, starts on Staten Island and finishes in Central Park in Manhattan). “There are already stands set up on the left,” Schulman added, giving Magisano an idea of the surroundings.
Magisano was diagnosed with retinoblastoma when he was 10 months old. He always had limited vision, but it wasn’t until ninth grade that he lost it completely over a period of three weeks. “I used to walk home from school every day and I would see the lines on the street getting blurrier and blurrier,” he said. He didn’t start running until much later, in 2017, after an unexpected conversation in a supermarket on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was standing with his cane in front of some peppers, a practical food, he said, because it can be eaten raw. Then, an older man touched his shoulder. “Do you run?” the man asked him, Magisano recalled. The man went on to tell him about Achilles, a group of runners with disabilities that met twice a week to run in Central Park. “I’ve always been interested in trying new things; I had 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 the director of Achilles chapters in the New York metropolitan area, and Sunday would be the sixth time he would run the New York City Marathon. Before the race, his goal was to run at a pace of 3 hours and 30 minutes, which is approximately 5 minutes per kilometer. Earlier this year, he completed a 517-kilometer triathlon—swimming, running, and cycling—over three days in Florida.
Visually impaired runners can have a maximum of two guides in the New York City Marathon. Guides do not have to pay an entry fee, do not receive a score, and do not receive an official finishing time. They must wear a bib to identify themselves and cannot push or pull the runner forward, according to the guidelines of the New York Road Runners organization, which is responsible for the marathon.
Magisano arranged to run with two guides. One would ensure that he ate and drank enough throughout the race. He likes to run with a new guide and with someone he has run with before. “That keeps it interesting,” said Magisano, who 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 decided to be a guide this year because he wanted his seventh time running the New York City Marathon to be different. He remembered how his pace in his first marathon was slower than expected and how he became increasingly slower as the race progressed. “I heard from behind: ‘Blind runner! Blind runner on your right!’ and two guides, and what I think was a woman in her 50s, zoomed past me,” Schulman said. That gave him a dose of humility and he knew that someday he would like to be a guide.
As Schulman told the story, a group of runners ahead of them—upon hearing the phrase “blind runner”—parted to make way for him and Magisano, assuming he was talking to them. But a woman, apparently mesmerized by a ray of sunlight touching a nearby tree, stopped in the middle of the path to take a photo. Schulman gently grabbed Magisano’s elbow and moved his own body to the right to guide him and pass around her.
Schulman said he hoped that being a guide would add a new level of satisfaction to the marathon. He said his goal was to “simply navigate the course successfully without incident, to get Francesco and me to the finish line.” The woman taking the photo was not the only obstacle to overcome. Schulman also calculated how to navigate around people they would soon catch up to or who were approaching them. He was attentive to 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-hanging branch. It was good practice. “Many times it’s difficult to hear my guides, so there are minutes when I don’t hear a word of what they say, so you have to rely solely on touch,” Magisano said about the New York City Marathon route. He said he focused on feeling his guides’ elbows and knees. “You can’t see it, but the hairs on our arms are like Avatar braids,” Schulman explained. “They sync up enough so that we can create a kind of bond.”
Magisano, who laughs easily, likes his guides to be people he can joke with. He appreciates guides who lead with confidence, are expressive, and speak their minds. And as much as the guides help Magisano, he also does his part. He prefers not to run on the painted lines on the street, which can make the path uneven, so he reminds the guides to steer him away from them. He asks them to tell him the pace they are running and how many kilometers they have covered. Above all, he also looks out for his safety.
Magisano says it’s common for guides to forget to eat and drink, which can be dangerous given the pace and distance they cover during marathons. “They’re so focused on guiding that they can go two hours without eating,” he said. Magisano has trained hundreds of guides, and Achilles is always looking for more. He joked that before he started running, his exercise was writing essays about the history of football. Now he does real physical exercise and has built a strong 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 relates a little to disability, because life is a struggle, but you have to overcome it, otherwise you will fail.”
Lola Fadulu is a reporter for the Metro section of the Times. She was part of a finalist team for an award…