Thomas Panek was able to ‘see’ the course and properly soak in the race atmosphere with Meta AI glasses.
At the start of a big race, most runners are juggling the usual things: squeezing into corrals, long porta-potty lines, and the creeping fear that their watch will fail them at the start line. For Thomas Panek, the morning of the NYC Half on March 15 came with all of that—plus a different kind of question mark.
Panek is the CEO of Lighthouse Guild, a nonprofit that provides vision care and support to people who are visually impaired. Panek himself is blind, and he’s also a veteran endurance runner. This year, he ran 13.1 miles across New York City with something new in his toolkit: AI glasses from Meta, custom running technology co-developed with Lighthouse Guild AI as a new initiative focused on building adaptive tech with blind and low-vision leadership at the center.“Start lines are always pretty stressful,” Panek told Runner’s World, but the nerves this time weren’t about staying with a goal pace or inclement weather. “It was more about technology ... from the standpoint of, is it going to work, is it not going to work, it was much more black and white.”What made the experiment unusual was the speed at which it was built. Panek said the team worked with Meta engineers to develop a “proactive AI” feature in the days leading up to the race, essentially customizing what the glasses would look for and communicate to him on course. “The glasses essentially are looking around all the time and you are telling it what you want to find,” he said, describing a prompt-building process that came down to the wire. “It wasn’t done until the night before at 7 p.m.”Before race day, Panek and the team put the system through its paces in Central Park, testing on the lower loop—an environment that, as any New York runner knows, is never just a calm little oval. And on the day of, Panek still ran with a guide runner Jed Laskowitz, an Achilles guide volunteer he’s run with before. The goal wasn’t to remove the human element as much as to shift what the human had to do. Panek told Laskowitz the glasses would handle many of the traditional verbal cues—turns, water stops, basic navigation—so Jed could focus more on safety and flow.That handoff, Panek said, felt like a leap of faith. “It’s almost like taking your hands off the steering wheel when you’re in a car,” he said. “There are things that it’s going to do for me that have never been done before, and it’s a strange experience.”Panek was also very clear about what a guide can do that tech can’t, at least not yet. He described a moment when a runner stopped suddenly after dropping a phone. Panek and Laskowitz clipped heels, but avoided a fall thanks to Jed’s quick reaction. “Your guide is focused on your safety,” Panek said. Even if a system can detect an obstacle, there’s a lag between what a camera captures and what a runner can process and react to at speed, especially without vision. That gap, he explained, is “an extraordinary challenge.”Where the glasses did shine was in delivering information that sighted runners often take for granted. Panek pointed to something deceptively simple: accurate mile markers. GPS can drift and your watch might buzz “10 miles” before you actually hit the “10 Mile” sign, but the glasses could see the marker and sync his stats to it. “I’ve never been able to do that before,” he said.They also helped with orientation. During the race, Panek thought the course went over the Manhattan Bridge. Instead, the glasses told him he was on the Brooklyn Bridge—a change from previous versions of the route that even caught his guide off guard. “People are fallible,” Panek said. The glasses, by contrast, stayed locked on the job and “didn’t get distracted.”Near mile 11, Panek passed supporters from Lighthouse Guild, turning his head and using the glasses to describe what was happening on the sidelines—shirts, logos, the cluster of “his people.” “I’ve run 20 marathons … and I’ve never known, not once, unless somebody’s yelling my name,” he said. With the glasses, the world around him became readable in an emotional way for him that it hadn’t been before.Racing is the high bar here with these types of advancements, but Panek emphasizes that daily life is the point. At Lighthouse Guild, he noted, the organization already trains people to use wearable tech for practical tasks like distinguishing a green pepper from a red pepper at the grocery store, or figuring out whether you’ve grabbed the can of apples or the jar of spaghetti sauce. And as Panek put it, sometimes what matters isn’t a description of the elevator walls. It’s, “Where are the buttons?”Overall success, Panek said, would be seeing the tech “in the wild”—people who are blind using the glasses and moving more freely with an understanding of their surroundings, whether that’s through reading signs, finding bus lines, or navigating daily life with less reliance on others. He sees the moment as bigger than just a race like the NYC Half. “Since the beginning of time, people who are blind have had three ways of mobility,” he said—cane, dog, or human guide. “The ability to do things independently using technology is incredible.”Blind runners do hard things all the time. The change here is being able to do them with tools that were designed with blind people at the center, and then carry that progress into everything else that happens off the course. Because if there’s success in an overly crowded half marathon, the day-to-day applications—transit, grocery shopping, using a hotel gym—start to look a lot closer than ever before.
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