No End in Sight: My Life as a Blind Iditarod Racer

Chapter One My Perfect Moment My perfect moment: dead of winter, dogs running flat out, air so cold I can taste its brittleness on the tip of my tongue. I know this trail, know it by heart. Ahead is a sharp switchback right, followed by a steep downhill, breaking into a series of tight S-curves. Any of these can cause a musher to wreck. I have the overwhelming sensation of speed. A blanket of snow-laden clouds hides the harshness of the sunlight. I squint to see the vague shapes of dogs out in front of me. They are indistinct and one-dimensional. I see a bit of harness over there, a leader's head bobbing, feet flying, a chest lunging, a tongue lolling up and down, the swish of a tail, the rump of a wheel dog. I know from past experience that the dark blobs flashing past on my right are pine trees. To the left is nothingness, a sheer drop-off of several hundred feet. I have absolute trust in my dogs. Their breathing comes hard and fast. They scream downhill. Full tilt. I tell myself, "Get ready for it." Bending both knees, I drop my center of gravity, getting as low as I can on the runners. The dogs kick up snow crystals that sting my cheeks like shards of glass; cold wind gnaws at my ears. "Stay off the brake! No matter how wild it gets, just stay off the brake!" Blasting into the switchback, I shift both feet to the right runner, my right leg instinctively extends out as if it were an outrigger, and I throw my weight to counterbalance the centrifugal force that wants to fling us to the outside of the curve. The runners chatter, sharp edges bite into the snow, and we whip around the corner with the sled sliding just a tiny little bit. Jamming out of the switchback, we plunge downhill. My overwhelming impulse is to mash the brake, dump some of this seductive speed. But this is a race. No time for caution. No time to get conservative. Girl, it's time to get athletic! Into the first S-curve. Into it and out just as quickly. Staying low. Shifting weight from one runner to the other like a dancer moving across the ballroom floor. Charging through the second S-curve, breaking out and blasting down the long straightaway. I did it. I grin, wildly pump one fist in the air, throw back my head, and shout, "Wahoo!" I may be young. I may be a girl. I may be visually impaired. But none of that has diddly-squat to do with the fact that I am a sled dog racer. My plan is to become world champion and to someday challenge the leaders of the Super Bowl of sled dog racing: the Iditarod. To me all the other stuff is irrelevant. But it seems that everyone I come in contact with wants to focus on one thing: what I can see or, to be more precise, what I cannot see. Yes, I am legally blind, but blindness has not stopped me. In fact, it has barely slowed me down. According to the legal definition, a person is blind if she has uncorrectable vision of 20-200. In a clinical setting with controlled lighting, my vision is about 20-200. But when light conditions change, my vision rapidly deteriorates. Doctors estimate my walk-around vision varies between 20-300 and 20-600. I was born with congenital achromatopsia, a rare genetic disorder caused by a recessive gene from both parents. In technical terms, I have a shortage of rods and cones in my retina. Rods and cones control light, color, and depth perception. Exactly what do I see? I have been asked that question a million times. All I can say is that I see what I see. It might not be what you see, but I do not think that makes my gift of sight any less distinctive or beautiful to me than what a normal person might see. It is jRachael Scdoris is the author of 'No End in Sight: My Life as a Blind Iditarod Racer', published 2007 under ISBN 9780312364373 and ISBN 0312364377.