Striding forward
Nate Gorham runs the beach early in the morning, before there are many people out.
But he still occasionally runs into someone.
Sometimes they get angry, he joked, but he actually didn’t see them there.
The Fort Myers Beach resident has a bright vest with the words “BLIND RUNNER” in big, bold letters, but he doesn’t want to bring that kind of attention to himself.
“I’m in my early 30s, I wasn’t just going to give up,” Gorham said. “You have to get over it.”
He’s staying fit for one of his many long-distance runs – he ran the Miami Half-Marathon this weekend and plans to run the Disney Half-Marathon in February, the Bataan 26th Mile Death March in March and the Boston Marathon in April. Also in February, he’ll be trying his hand at a new sport, entering a skiing competition in Vermont, hosted by the U.S. Association of Blind Athletes (USABA).
He’s now active and athletic, but when he first learned he was going to lose his sight, he had no idea what he would do with his life.
The West Virginia native served for seven years in the U.S. Army, including a tour in Iraq. When he returned home, he noticed his sight was deteriorating – and after visiting doctor after doctor, he was diagnosed with cone dystrophy, a progressive eye deterioration that slowly eats away his vision.
Right now, he still has some peripheral vision, he can read with a special magnifying device, but it will continue to get worse.
He’s had time to get used the idea, he said, since it’s a progressive disorder. But the 32-year-old said it was a shock to find out he was going to lose his vision completely.
“When you’re told you’re going to go blind, it takes a little while to bite down,” he said.
He realized, he had no idea what to expect. Or what to do. He didn’t even know a blind person, he said. “All those accessibility features on the iPhone that I never had to care about?”, he had to find out how to use them, he said, with a chuckle.
“Your whole lifestyle changes, ‘what am I going to do?'” he said. “Having no experience, you have no idea what’s out there, you think you’re going to sit in the dark. How do you get out?”
His first action was to move out of the hills – he needed to be somewhere that had reliable public transportation in close proximity.
And since he was moving, he picked Florida for the weather and the beach. He and his father checked out the east and west coasts, but Gorham found his home on Donora Boulevard in Fort Myers Beach, and he moved in August 2015. His dad is moving in full time and selling the house in West Virginia.
It was a great location for the beach, and Gorham relied on the trolleys to take him around. But he still didn’t know what he was going to do every day.
“I was Googling, ‘what do blind people do?'” he said. “I was always an active guy, but the year or two after I got out I went to being not so active. You get into that depressed state.”
Not long after moving, his internet searches brought him to the national Blind Veteran’s Association with a Florida chapter. He started connecting with people in the group and going to meetings, making connection after connection and learned more and more about the opportunities he never knew he could do. Different group members started inviting him to go on runs or go kayaking.
Through his connections last spring, he found USABA, an organization dedicated to providing athletic competitions for visually impaired veterans. It was going to hold a marathon in California in December.
Gorham signed up with six months to train after a few years of not being very active, and he ran it, and he met lots of other people, with stories and backgrounds like his.
“I knew that this was a good group, this is my kind of people,” he said.
Now, he’s planning for the next USABA event, the skiing competition in Vermont. He’s never skied before, but figures he’ll pick it up with a few practice runs on the bunny hill first. Although he’s a competitive guy, it’s about more than the contest. It’s the friendships and being a part of something.
Gorham has a positive attitude, and he probably wouldn’t have sat around for the rest of his life, he said, but finding USABA has accelerated his discovery that his blindness won’t end his productivity.
“I might have figured it out on my own, but having no exposure, you don’t know what else to do and you think nobody else in the world has this problem,” he said. “But I try to be positive and I’m having a good time. There are so many more people with worse problems than I have.”