Soft rope in hand, Christa Earl prepares for a run at the Road Runner's Club. PHOTO: Kodi Barth

he woman who bursts into the room at New York Road Runner's Club in East Manhattan has her eyes wide open. Before anyone has a chance to acknowledge her arrival, she has paced, soundlessly, over a stair with the sign, "Watch your step," past two doors, into the changing room at the back. A stranger would not notice she has been blind practically all her life.

Aided only by a white cane, she has changed three trains from her office across town near Penn Station. It is 6.20 in the evening. In ten minutes, she will hit the road with a dozen other runners.

Christa Earl, 45, blind since fourth grade, is New York's best known blind runner. Last spring she entered the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge in New York, and completed the marathon in four and half hours.

"I walked while she ran; she left me in the dust immediately," said Carl R. Augusto, President of the American Foundation of the Blind. "Christa has demonstrated that she is an outstanding athlete in addition to an outstanding professional, and a wonderful and caring human being."

After several months of rigorous practice, during which she occasionally ran 20 miles in a day, Earl completed the New York City Marathon last November, turning up 803rd among the 1,548 women in her age group. For that run, she won the Achilles Club Athlete of the Year Award. The global, 20-year-old club encourages disabled people to participate in long-distance races alongside other runners

PHOTO: Kodi Barth The sign reads "Watch your step," but Earl has never seen it.

t the Road Runner's Club, where she runs every Tuesday and Saturday, calls of "Hey, Christa," quickly suggest she is a fond figure. She returns the greetings with an easy smile and several waves. With little fuss, she folds her cane and lays her backpack on the table at the centre of the room - which she didn't bump into.

"Actually, things and people bump into me, especially things," she says with a touch of humor.

She heads out to the bathroom, her movements still quick and agile. The light on the bathroom door reads "Occupied." At the threshold, she stops suddenly and spins around. There is no telling how she knew it was occupied; probably movements from inside. "My sense of hearing is pretty strong," she explains later.

At 6.30 the group hits the road. Earl holds out a three-inch white rope to her guide, Andy Ashwell, who grabs the other end and starts jogging with her.

"We're going to take it nice and easy, Christa," says Aswhell. "No rush."

But ten minutes later, inside Central Park, Ashwell, breathless, hands the rope to a second guide.

Christa Earl grew up in Fort Wayne, Ind., in a family of two parents and three sisters. In third grade she realized she had difficulty reading.

"They thought I was making it up," she said.

But when her parents took her to the doctor, it was discovered Earl had unusual pigments on her retina. One year after her discovery, she was diagnosed with juvenile macular degeneration, a disorder that causes cells of the retina to die.

"I only remember things like quarters," she says of her childhood. "I remember sitting in the back row at class and reading the blackboard, but I can't really imagine doing it."
In sixth grade, she could still take her notebook to the board and, squinting, copy out the homework. But by seventh grade, her sight was practically gone.

PHOTO: Kodi Barth At her office in Eleven Pen Plaza, Earl spends months building Web sites

espite her disability, Earl lived a normal childhood, biking, swimming and walking. In college, she took Computer Science, and now spends months building Web pages for the American Foundation for the Blind.

Earl has turned off all colors on her Windows 2000, leaving only a dark background.
"That way I can tell when a strong color is loading onto the screen, because I can spot white against black," she says of the slightest sight she can claim.

Away from the tracks and sidewalks, Earl runs through everything else she does. It is the beginning of April and she is sitting at her desk in Eleven Pen Plaza, typing furiously at her computer. JAWS for Windows, a screen-reader, keeps talking on her speakers, spelling out every letter she types or reading out entire paragraphs.

She enters a Web address and instantly notices a glitch.

"We have here a nav-bar without links," she says. A few lines down, she meets a graphic she can't decipher. "You know what would really help? Label graphics with alt-tags," she says. And with a few quick strokes she turns her operating system to MS-DOS, makes a copy of the Web page and demonstrates "the right way to do graphics."

"Alt equals photo of Kodi Barth," echoes the screen reader, after her typing.

PHOTO: Kodi Barth Earl's jog shoes and track suits litter her office.

"There," she says. "Now everybody can read what you have on this page."

The demonstration has lasted just under three minutes; then she is on to another chore. Before the end of the day, she must make good progress on her current project, building Braille Bug, a kids' section of her company's Web site.

Amidst all her work paraphernalia, however, a coat hanger by the opposite wall displayed two pairs of tracksuits. Those tracksuits get to that hanger every morning, after Earl's workout at the gym across the street from her office building. They are also a constant reminder of the next Chase Corporate Challenge. Like everything else in her life, she can't wait to run that race.

"I'm always just in a hurry," she says.

CHRISTA'S FACTS

• Age: 45
• Height: 5' 7''
• Occupation: Web operations
• Hobby: baking

RELATED LINKS

Christa's Running Feats