SYDNEY – Marla Runyan cannot distinguish broccoli from spinach while walking the buffet line at the Olympic Village. The small size of her cellphone numbers and readout make the instrument just about useless to her. Her competitors are faceless, not because of any psyche job, but because there is merely blur where nose and mouth should be.

Marla Runyan is legally blind, the world a hazy blend of colors and shapes due to a degenerative disease that struck her at age 9. One day she had normal sight and then the chalkboard in her fourth-grade class began to disappear.

That Runyan handles her condition without seeking pity or special treatment is a credit to her pluck. That she has emerged from the Paralympics in 1996 to become one of the finest 1,500-meter runners in the world for these Olympics is remarkable.

Our sports society is replete with athletes – many pampered and well-compensated – talking about overcoming adversity or that no one believed in them. Usually the truth is just about everyone believed in them and their adversity could include everything from a few boos to losing arbitration.

And here is Runyan facing true adversity with grace. The 31-year-old Californian runs on sense of sound and athletic ability, the lap clocks on the infield as useful to her as carrying a 50-pound weight. Not being able to see the clocks in running would define adversity. With a giggle, Runyan admits she only wears a watch when she runs because everyone else does.

She says hearing the breathing rates of competitors enables her make judgments about how to race, though she concedes that with 110,000 fans expected at the Olympic Stadium, it is unlikely she will hear breathing or footsteps.

However, with a mix of pride and defiance, she offers that “I am not a klutz.” Distance running, because of its absence of lanes, produces plenty of bumping and jostling. Yet, despite being unable to focus on her opponents, Runyan claims to have never caused a crash because “I have a good sense of someone’s mechanics when they are moving next to me.”

“I don’t see this as a disability on the track,” Runyan said. “As far as I’m concerned, how the track looks to me is how it looks to everyone else.”

Runyan has Stargadt’s Disease, which most often strikes children, impairing the retina and corroding the middle vision of the eye. Runyan has peripheral vision, which leaves her able to see to her side, but unable to make out a big object directly in front of her. With contact lenses, her eyesight is 20/300 in her left eye and 20/400 in the right.

So she could run on a track, but to read she needs either a powerful magnifying glass or a specially designed camera that greatly enlarges the print size. Her gray-blue eyes are glassy, the right one not centered and Runyan tilts her head in the direction of an inquisitor before honing in on exactly where the words are coming from. On the track, the redness of the track and the uniform colors stand out. But she can only tell competitors by body type because the facial features are too indistinguishable.

Runyan says she runs “because it is something I can do independently. I have a strength on the track that I do not have in other parts of my life.” For example, she would like to study to become a chiropractor, but is skeptical if she would have the capability to do all the reading necessary. But she can go off by herself on a training run.

In 1996, Runyan won a Paralympics heptathlon gold medal in Atlanta. She had been encouraged at the Olympic Trials that year because her heptathlon 800 run of 2:04.70 was the fastest for an American in that event sighted or blind. She told a fellow competitor, “I’m going to Sydney, but not in the Paralympics.”

She moved to Oregon and began training solely as a distance runner. She stamped herself by winning last year’s Pan-Am Games 1,500. She finished third at this year’s Olympic Trials to get here. That has drawn her world-wide recognition. She began her own website – marlarunyan.com – that has received nearly 22,000 hits. She says he is inundated by mail from those who say she has touched their life.

“My race only lasts four minutes,” Runyan said. “But the difference it makes on others lasts a lot longer than that.”

Runyan is not a medal favorite. But she is talented enough to survive the 1,500 rounds Sept. 27 and 28, and reach the final Sept. 30. She says she keeps having flashes of fifth place in her mind, though she claims to be hoping for better.

Wherever she finishes, Runyan will inspire. Bare in mind that when she was competing in the heptathlon she had to pace off the distance between hurdles to know how many there were and did not know her competitors could see them all until one just happened to tell her.

Then again being unable to see her hurdles has not stopped Marla Runyan from soaring over them.