Blind faith

Last Saturday, for just over 40 minutes, Wellesley resident David Kennedy was blind.

Kennedy, who serves on the board of the National Braille Press, was one of about 28 sighted runners to take part in the Blindfold Challenge of the Vision 5K, a run/walk that raises money for Boston-based organizations that serve the blind and the visually impaired. The race, now in its sixth year, benefits the Carroll Center for the Blind, the Greater Boston Guild for the Blind, the Perkins School for the Blind, the National Braille Press and MAB Community Services, and has also been designated as the national championship by the U.S. Association of Blind Athletes.

For Kennedy, who is not a runner by nature, it was the introduction of the Blindfold Challenge that inspired him to run the Vision 5K this year for the first time. Along with the other sighted runners running in solidarity with blind athletes, Kennedy was blindfolded — “I couldn’t see a thing,” he said, holding up the thick black eye patch that he and the other sighted runners wore — and ran the 3.1-mile race with his 15-year-old daughter, Mary, a freshman at Wellesley High School, as his guide.

“I always said the only running I’d do would be 90 feet — from one side of the basketball court to the other,” Kennedy said with a laugh. “But when the Blindfold Challenge came up, I thought, this is something I can’t pass up.”

Having Mary, also a self-proclaimed nonrunner, run with him as his guide, he said, was amazing. The pair went on a couple of training runs, one unofficial, around the Wellesley High School track, and one official, on the streets of Newton. They used a shoelace, about 40 inches long, with loops on either end, as their tether, though Kennedy said he discovered early on that he was more comfortable actually being able to touch Mary’s hand or elbow.

On race day, he said, “I felt very comfortable running … and certainly a big part of that was trusting my guide.” As comfortable as he was, though, he said, he found the most disconcerting moments of the race to be “when you had a lot of people around you, and a lot of sounds around you, and you weren’t sure how close they were.”

This year’s race director for the Vision 5K was Dave McGillivray, race director of the Boston Marathon, who himself has run 118 marathons, including 35 consecutive Boston Marathons. Before the Vision 5K, Kennedy sat talking with McGillivray, who once ran Boston blindfolded. “That’s the one he doesn’t remember,” Kennedy said. After his own experience running blindfolded, Kennedy said, he understands why. “You don’t have any visuals to remind you of the race.”

In addition to the race component of the Vision 5K, which draws elite blind and visually impaired runners from all over the world, there is a walk, which Kennedy’s wife, Jean Garrity, and youngest daughter, Elizabeth, 11, participated in this year, along Elizabeth’s friend, Dorothy Wigon. The three walked as members of a team dubbed “Harry Potter and the Walking Wizards,” to raise funds and awareness about the Braille edition of the seventh and final Harry Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”

For the second time, the National Braille Press is partnering with Scholastic to release the Braille book on the same day that the print version is released, and for the same cost, giving blind children equal access to the long-anticipated final installment of the beloved series.

“Can you imagine being a 12-year-old and not being able to read Harry Potter?” Kennedy said. Until 2005, when the National Braille Press was able to work with Scholastic to get the books printed and out on the same day as the print version was released, that was exactly what was happening. Now, anyone who pre-ordered the book from the National Braille Press will be able to receive it on the much-anticipated release date: July 21. Kennedy said the Press anticipates the Braille edition will be more than 1,100 pages long, and weigh close to 10 pounds.

When people learn of his involvement with the National Braille Press, Kennedy said, they “always ask me, is their blindness in your family? Well no, there’s no blindness in my family, but it’s not about blindness,” he said, “It’s all about literacy. If you could even imagine not being able to read … imagine walking into a library and not having anything to read.”

One of their favorite sayings over at the National Braille Press, Kennedy said, is “‘It’s not about charity, it’s about parity.’ It’s about fairness,” he said. When the board and the staff sat down to try to figure out how they could accomplish their goals of getting more Braille material — books, magnetic refrigerator letters, information for parents — out to the families who need it, the question was, at first, “how can we do this?” Kennedy said. “The answer is simply, how can we not do this? That’s our rallying cry.”