Terri Rupp poses in the street in her gated community in southwest Las Vegas with daughter Marley Jane Rupp Wednesday, March 30, 2022. Mother and daughter, both of whom are blind, are competing in the Braille Across America run/walk/bike challenge to raise funds and awareness for blind literacy and printing books in braille.
Tuesday, April 12, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Growing up legally blind, Las Vegan Terri Rupp remembers navigating an education system tailored for sighted students. And now her daughter, Marley Jane Rupp, is clearing many of those same hurdles for herself.
It started in the mid-1980s when Terri Rupp was 2 years oldand emigrated to California from Cambodia. Soon after arriving in the United States, her family noticed she seemed to have difficulty seeing.
That led to a flurry of visits to different doctors, some of whom thought her vision would correct itself as she got older and others afraid her eyesight would worsen over time.
As it turns out, both Terri Rupp, 39, and Marley Jane, 12, suffer from optic nerve atrophy, a condition where the nerves that carry images of what the eye sees to the brain are permanently damaged, according to the National Library of Medicine. The affliction can cause vision to dim over time as well as difficulty seeing light, colors or the ability to see fine detail.
“I’ve always had difficulty seeing details,” she said. “I have really horrible depth perception. I used to be able to read print and large print with high-powered magnifiers. Now, if I write something on a piece of paper, I can’t even see the ink.”
The mother and daughter have embarked on the monthlong “Braille Across America” challenge, a pandemic-inspired grassroots fundraising event by the National Braille Press, a Boston-based nonprofit that aims to raise money to benefit Braille literacy programs, such as converting textbooks and school materials as well as children’s books into Braille.
From March 17 to April 18, the Rupps and nearly 90 others across the country will either run, walk, bike or move in an athletic fashion a total of at least 26.2 miles to complete the challenge. Last year’s event raised more than $142,000, according to National Braille Press President Brian Mac Donald, and was created after the COVID-19 pandemic canceled the 2020 Boston Marathon, which was a partner with the organization.
Terri Rupp and Marley Jane, however, have a slightly different goal in mind. Rather than the 26.2 miles required to complete the challenge, Marley Jane decided to run 100 miles because it costs more than three times as much to produce a book in Braille than it does in print.
“It stinks!” Marley Jane said, much preferring to walk, bike or rollerblade. Anything but run.
For Terri Rupp, however, that’s been easy. In 2018, she ran her first 26.2 miles during the Las Vegas Rock n’ Roll Marathon. A few months later she ran another marathon in St. George, Utah, and a few months after that ran 50 kilometers — or 31.2 miles — in Henderson’s Jackpot Ultra Running Festival.
Terri Rupp sits on the executive board of the National Braille Press as well as the National Federation of the Blind but otherwise is a stay-at-home mom for Marley Jane and her 10-year-old son, Jackson, who is sighted. It also allows Terri Rupp ample time to run several hours a day in her gated Las Vegas neighborhood, a passion she’s now enjoyed for more than a decade.
“She’s very dedicated to her goals as a runner,” said Christy Gadoury, a friend of Terri’s and Las Vegas chapter president of Achilles International, a group that pairs blind runners with sighted guides.
Gadoury said Terri Rupp was upset that the Henderson run was canceled in 2020 because Terri had planned to run her first 100-mile race. So, naturally, Terri hosted a race for family and friends in her own neighborhood, dubbed the “Crackpot 100,” completing the length of the race over two days.’
“It was just a lot of giggling,” Gadoury said of the makeshift race. “It sounds silly, but you get to a certain point in the night, and everybody devolves to like a 13-year-old at a sleepover.”
Since then, Terri has run distances of 115 and 150 miles over 72-hour spans. The goal, eventually is to run 200 miles under a single event. As of April 5, Terri has run 114 miles for “Braille Across America.” She also has a goal of completing 39 miles in one day, to commemorate her turning 39 on April 2.
Navigating blindness
As Terri Rupp went through grade school in the ’80s and ’90s, what little vision she had was enough to avoid learning Braille, at the advice of educators. She instead would use high-powered magnifying glasses to make regular text at least semi-legible.
When it became time for Marley Jane to enroll in classes, assessors for the Clark County School District told Terri Rupp and her husband, Aaron, much of the same that Terri’s parents were told: Hold off on teaching Marley Jane Braille and use adaptive learning materials instead, like large-print books or magnifying glasses.
Terri described it a “constant struggle for years” trying to get Marley Jane’s coursework translated into Braille. At first, the assignments had to be translated and specially printed, but that could take weeks after the homework was first assigned.
She was eventually given a school aide to help read class assignments. And even now, Marley Jane gets pulled from class for Braille instruction, which can interrupt the flow of a normal school day.
“When they started integrating Braille into the classrooms and having a teacher for the visually impaired coming to teach her, it still wasn’t enough,” Terri said. “Even now, we both don’t read (Braille) as fast as anybody reading print.”
Marley Jane points out her vision is decidedly better than her mother’s — until she takes off her glasses. That’s when lines start to blur and colors fade, making it difficult to tell certain objects apart.
“It’s hard to see print,” Marley Jane said. “It’s hard to see when kids are approaching in the beginning of the day, because of the angle of the sun. It gets in my eyes, and it gets very difficult to see.”
Braille training
Terri Rupp started running shortly after she gave birth to Marley Jane. It had always been a lifelong dream to run a marathon, she said, so she started with short runs in her neighborhood and on the treadmill.
Fortunate enough to run without the need of a guide, it would never have been possible without a nine-month stint at the National Federation of the Blind’s Louisiana training center back in 2006, where she enrolled after meeting blind role models at her job with the Society for the Blind in Sacramento. There, she was under a blindfold for eight hours a day, five days a week, and learned skills like cooking and woodworking and, of course, Braille.
“I would not be the person that I am and would not be able to push beyond my limits if it wasn’t for the hours and hours of training I did at the Louisiana Center for the Blind,” Terri Rupp said. “It produces so many incredible results because we were pushed beyond our limits.”
After Terri Rupp’s time in Louisiana, she and Aaron moved to Las Vegas where she would finish her degree at UNLV and start a family. She started running to lose “baby weight,” and that hobby became an addiction.
The neighbors in her south valley neighborhood quickly got the gist and it soon became common to see Terri Rupp running in the middle of the street. Conveniently, her neighborhood is a 1.1-mile loop that she’s learned better than the back of her hand over the years.
“I basically have muscle memory with my feet with how many hundreds of miles I’ve done in this neighborhood in the last 10 years I’ve lived here,” Terri Rupp said, adding that she knows she’s near an intersection because she can sense a difference in wind and sound patterns. “I just know where to go.”
Sometimes, though, Terri Rupp’s blindness can lead to awkward situations.
There was one time, Marley Jane teases, that her mom accidentally walked into her neighbor’s house after getting discombobulated. Other times, Terri Rupp might wave hello to a somebody who turns out to be nobody.
“Sometimes, I’ll be walking in the neighborhood or walking with my kids at the park, and I’ll say hi to a trash can thinking I’m saying hi to a person.”
