Kyle Robidoux on guides, and the first Athletes with Disabilities division at Vermont 100

In July 2017 Kyle Robidoux was doing what every first-time hundred-mile runner does in taper week: second-guessing a mediocre fifty-miler from a few weeks earlier, and trusting the crew instead. The difference was that he would be running the Vermont 100 in its inaugural Athletes with Disabilities division, because he is legally blind.

He has described his sight as looking through a toilet-paper roll. Trail texture and obstacles are invisible to him, which means every training run and every race depends on a guide.

The practical questions

The episode is mostly logistics, and better for it:

• Finding a guide. Not the same job as pacing. A guide is running the terrain out loud, continuously, for hours, and needs to be reliable at exactly the point in the night when everyone is least reliable.
• Training for rolling hills from a city. Boston is not Vermont. The episode gets specific about how you build the legs for that course without access to it.
• Perspective after a race that did not go well. A fifty-miler that disappointed him, and what he took from it that was actually useful.
• What sighted runners can do. The most practically useful segment: how to volunteer as a guide, what it involves, and why the shortage is real.

On the AWD division itself

The conversation does not treat the new division as unambiguously good news. It covers how it came about and where it might go, and raises concerns about it too — categorisation, who qualifies, and what happens when a division designed to open a race up becomes a way of setting it apart. That scepticism, from someone the division was created for, is the most valuable thing in the episode.

Robidoux also runs United in Stride, which exists to connect visually impaired runners with sighted guides — an unglamorous matching problem that is the actual bottleneck for most people in his position.

And the beer

The show being what it is, a decent stretch goes to the New England beer scene and where it might be in five years. Robidoux writes about running and beer in roughly equal measure, so the tangent is on-brand for both of them.