When Chaz Davis started to lose his vision in 2013, he also worried about losing his identity. But running helped him regain it—and so much more.
When Chaz Davis was a kid, he played sports, such as soccer, basketball, and baseball. But as he put it, he was bad at them. “[At a basketball camp in middle school] the coach told me, ‘You’re never going to be a good basketball player. You’re just too soft,’” Davis toldThat stuck in Davis’s mind, and he decided he would work harder than everybody else to make up for what he lacked in talent. And when he found running, and he started to excel right away.
As Davis learned to manage his disease, he felt like he was losing his identity as a runner—he went from “Chaz the runner” to “Chaz the blind guy.” He fell into depression and substance abuse and gained 60 pounds. Davis’s Paralympic dreams started to seem more attainable in late 2015 and early 2016, while he was still in college. He was training with his teammates and being coached by his college coach. He graduated in the spring of 2016, so track season was over after that, but his coach kept working with him, giving him workouts every week. Eventually, he was running better than he had as a sighted person.
In the summer of 2016, Davis had decided to sign up for the California International Marathon in December, as sort of a post-Paralympics victory lap, but he didn’t give it much thought until after he got home from Rio in late September. It would be his first marathon. He took a week off of running and then dove into a condensed marathon training plan.
He finished in 2:31:48—and later he found out that he broke the American record for his class of visually impaired runners.2018 Boston Marathon
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