How a Kansas Citian overcame fear, depression and became world’s fastest blind runner
Before he became the world’s fastest blind runner and a motivational speaker and seminary student and learned four instruments and played in a jazz band, David Brown had to confront the paralyzing fear and agony delivered by a rare condition, Kawasaki Disease, that spurred a rarer-yet result of glaucoma.
Despite so many trips to Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City for treatment and surgeries that a nurse gave him what he calls the “catchy” nickname of “Downtown David Brown,” he lost his left eye at age 3 and his overall vision by age 13.
And despite the loving foundation he had in his mother and grandmother and support from nurses and doctors at Children’s Mercy and at the Sabates Eye Center and teachers at the Kansas City Children’s Center for the Visually Impaired (CCVI), he at times felt alone. And petrified.
While he tried to cling to hope his vision might return, the pressure in his remaining eye became so high that he became afraid to go outside because of his intense light sensitivity.
“As bright as it was, it was terrifying me,” he said in a phone interview from California, where the 100-meter world-record holder among blind sprinters (10.92 seconds) is training for the Tokyo Paralympics in August as he seeks to repeat his gold-medal performance from Rio in the T11 classification for the most extremely visually impaired.
“And of course I was afraid of the dark, because I couldn’t see what was in the dark,” he added. “It really messed up my mind.”
Even what proved to be a vital step forward began with a piercing twist for the now-28-year-old:
At age 11, he set out for Missouri School for the Blind in St. Louis, where his mother (Francine) and sister (Breana) moved with him. But a variety of issues came with that for his family, including financial troubles and what he preferred to simply call “this problem and that problem.”
And he could only think, “I’m the cause of all this. This is my fault.”
So at 13, he was engulfed in depression and contemplating suicide.
Having been raised a Christian, he said, his faith in the grace of God helped sustain him. But he also was saved by something more worldly: the outlet of sports in general and, ultimately, track in particular. Wrestling and goalball and running all enabled him to vent and move towards what would come to matter the most: embracing his blindness, which changed his perceptions and perspectives in many ways.
So he prayed and cried and let out his rage and frustration in those controlled settings and found escape in those things he loved, including running.
He was 5 or 6 years old, back in Kansas City, when he first had the inkling he was fast after a race associated with the CCVI Trolley Run in which he finished second.
“But only because I slipped on mud,” he said, laughing.
At the Missouri School for the Blind, he learned to run holding a guide wire, well-described by Runner’s World as “something like a clothesline at hip height” and began to understand more about himself in the process as he was emerging from his despondency.
“He learned more about his mobility,” his mother, Francine Brown, who lives back in Kansas City now but could not immediately be reached, told Runner’s World. “He adapted really well. He was a good kid. I told him at home, ‘There’s no sitting down, no pouting.’ I didn’t move furniture. He had to learn to get around.
“He learned his independence, which was great. He was a strong child.”
Soon came another pivot point: As he advanced in track, he wrote a compelling essay about how sports had impacted his life.
It focused in part on how the struggle in sports parallels the struggles of life, and how you can’t give up and have to adapt to circumstances and push through the pain.
The essay, incidentally, was submitted for a contest to attend the 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing. It won, and, he said, “the rest was history” after his experience sitting near the top of the Beijing National Stadium, better known as the Bird’s Nest.
While he could see only spots and dots by then, a friend described the atmosphere and he felt the vibe.
He knew he would dedicate himself to making the 2012 Paralympics in London, where he indeed reached the semifinals of the 100 and 200, and to wherever else this might go.
After steady improvement led to him anchoring a team at the Penn Relays, he was invited to train at Paralympic camps … including at the Chula Vista Elite Athlete Training Center where he later was invited to live and train during a career that has included the pleasure of meeting Maurice Greene, another area native once known as the world’s fastest man.
That was when he began to train in the T11 category, in which athletes are required to wear gauze and a blindfold over their eyes and run in tandem with a guide. As for any other competitors, whatever scant remaining vision he had left now was altogether neutralized for competition … making for another tier of embracing his blindness.
Once again, it wasn’t a simple or easy adjustment even as Brown began to experience heightened senses of what was around him such as hearing where his competitors are in some races.
So even as he was still learning his own parameters and finding his form after years spent holding the wire with his left hand and pumping only with his right, now he had to find a way to maximize that by trusting a guide he didn’t know to whom he’d attach himself with a fabric tether.
What he jokingly called like a “three-legged race” would be foreign enough for a sighted person to do so, he said, but imagine how it might feel to him to both cut loose and be in sync?
It was hard enough to walk straight, let alone run straight, hard enough to conceive technique to critique without seeing tape of himself.
But his coach, Joaquim Cruz, the Brazilian who won a gold medal in the 800 at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, made a momentous decision to pair Brown with veteran guide Jerome Avery.
Like anything else worth doing, it wasn’t instant magic between Brown and Avery, who had competed in the 2000 and 2004 USA Track & Field Olympic trials before becoming a renowned guide runner for several athletes.
But through endless workouts and time spent together, they cultivated a certain rhythm and chemistry that led to Brown in 2014 becoming the first completely blind athlete to break the 11-second barrier in the 100.
That very weekend, he also broke the same category of record in the 200 with a time of 22.41. Brown also ran with Avery, his partner of seven years, at the Rio Paralympics.
But an injury to Avery has made for a fresh challenge as Brown tries to repeat as Paralympic champion.
For the last few months, Brown has been working with 20-year-old Moray Steward, who is less than half Avery’s age (42), several inches shorter than the equally 5-9 Brown and Avery and had little previous experience as a guide.
That required an entirely new feeling-out process and navigating some bumps, including into each other coming out of the blocks in one race. But over time, they’ve gelled more as they’ve learned each other better and developed their own way of communicating.
That typically includes Steward helping align Brown in the blocks just right, he said, and calling out when to “drive, drive, drive” and “accelerate” … reaching the halfway point… the 20-meter mark and, finally, “5 and lean.”
As for the syncing up, Steward said, the height difference matters little.
“He has more stride length; I have more stride frequency,” he said. “So it matches up.”
Just like how almost everything else has come into alignment for Brown, who recently became engaged to Rebekah Hill, a former USA Archery Achievement Award winner.
Their future plans include forming their own fitness business while he seeks to do ministry work. He also figures he’ll be shooting for the 2024 Paris Paralympics in track … and then maybe will see about joining the blind soccer team for the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
Everything is possible, he figures now, through his faith and sports.
And maybe through some fusion of both that is the essence of how he feels so free to run with a guide.
“I’ve got to trust my guide with my ability to get down the track,” he said. “And off the track, as well as on the track, I’ve got to trust God with my ability to get through life.”
A life he appreciates all the more for the journey.
“It was worth going through to be where I am now,” he said, later adding, “We can all look back and see it was all for a purpose.”