How Smart Glasses Helped This Blind Runner "See" the NYC Marathon While a Legend Coached Him to the Finish
As Thomas Panek strode through the third mile of the NYC Half Marathon in March, world champion ultramarathoner Scott Jurek was in the blind runner's ear.
"OK, you're on a hill now," Jurek told Panek. "Make sure you're picking up your toes a little more, and let's drive those arms a bit more."
Having Jurek go into what Panek calls "Scott Jurek coaching mode" was old hat for the two friends: They'd run together before, with Jurek as Panek's guide runner in 5Ks and marathons, and with Panek accompanying the long-distance legend during his pursuit of the Appalachian Trail speed record in 2015.
But this time, Jurek wasn't actually with Panek. While the 56-year-old was pounding the Manhattan pavement, the legendary ultra racer was almost 2,000 miles away in his home in Boulder, CO, seeing the race from Panek's point of view on a video call.
Panek, the CEO of Lighthouse Guild, a non-profit focused on accessibility for the blind and visually impaired, was testing new technology. He was wearing smart glasses that helped guide him through the race-calling out bumps and potholes, describing landmarks and the colors of fans' shirts-and occasionally buzzed one of the world's greatest distance runners for coaching advice.
It was a race experience that he hopes will help open new doors for the visually impaired and blind, and one that had started less than an hour before at the start line, when Panek had uttered the words, "Hey Meta, I'm running a half-marathon. Help me out."
Turning Mainstream Tech Into an Accessibility Game-Changer
Both AI and Meta's Ray-Ban AI smart glasses can be troubling to the general public. The former continues to be touted as preparing to take away thousands of jobs, and the latter is used by creeps, "pickup artists," and pranksters to record people without their knowledge. But for the visually impaired, these twin technologies can be transformative.
"[The glasses] weren't made for people who are blind, but when you're using the camera, you can take a picture and say, ‘tell me what it is.' And it'll say, ‘you're looking at a jar of spaghetti sauce," Panek says. "For $300, I basically have a camera on my face that can tell me things I can't see."
But as tech products advance, Panek says, they often become less accessible to the blind, as keyboards and buttons are removed in favor of touch screens. In the case of Meta's glasses, the audio response about spaghetti sauce was set to be replaced by a visual readout of the answer in an update, which would have rendered this emerging tool for the blind useless.
As CEO of the Lighthouse Guild, Panek was actually in the position to do something about it. Through a connection with Thomas Siebel, a Silicon Valley executive who'd lost his sight and sought help from Lighthouse, Panek was able to connect with Meta and challenge the company to make their glasses not just something that could help blind people by chance, as the specs had in their original design, but to actively make them a tool useful for the visually impaired.
"We started to explain how impactful these things are to people who are blind, and how Meta could really make a difference if these glasses could do more than they're doing now," Panek says of his meetings with Meta. "One of the ideas we had was to help with navigation."
Navigating at even walking speed is a challenge for these technologies already. For Panek, though, who has run more than 20 marathons and half marathons and developed a guide dog running program, challenging the glasses to guide a blind runner could create even more independence.
While some visually impaired people can train a dog to take them on runs on specific, repeated routes, most running assistance for the blind is in the form of a human guide runner. The sighted guide runs next to the visually impaired runner, attached by a tether. The guide runner gives verbal advice about what's happening, like if there are other runners nearby, or a pothole or speed bump coming up, and can also use the tether to move the impaired runner in case of an emergency to avoid a fall or collision.
Panek envisioned the glasses as (eventually) taking the place of a running guide dog, letting blind runners go for runs even when guides weren't available.
"I said, ‘I want to see mile markers. I want to see water stops. I want to see the finish line, and I want to see turns," he said in his meetings with Meta engineers. "And I want to see anything else that's really kind of iconic, and it would tell me when it sees these things."
Related: These Underrated Nutrients Can Make or Break Marathon Performance, Sports Dietician Says
Testing Remote Coaching from Two Thousand Miles Away
"Wait, am I getting my job taken away from me?"
That was Jurek's bemused reaction when he heard that he would be guiding Panek from his couch, instead of the race course.
In addition to his exploits as an ultra legend, including six consecutive victories at the Western States 100, Jurek is an experienced guide runner. In 2015, he'd helped Panek finish the Boston Marathon to benefit Panek's efforts with Guiding Eyes for the Blind, an organization that breeds and trains guide dogs.
"For me, as a guide, it's awesome to just be in person and have that interaction and facilitate the sensory experience," Jurek says, "like bringing him close to the crowd so he can get high fives and his arms and our shoulders are getting thrown off-joint."
But this time, he was told, he'd be high-five-less. He'd sit in a room in his home and get a call from Panek on WhatsApp. He'd be able to see through the eyes of Panek's glasses from multiple angles, and coach his friend through parts of the run.
For safety, Panek would still have an in-person guide runner; neither he nor Jurek was confident that the glasses or Jurek's remote coaching would be quick enough to get Panek to stop if another runner cut him off. But aside from the safety of the tether, Panek would be putting his "vision" into the hands of the glasses and of a runner watching from his phone seven states away.
Racing Through Manhattan with Digital Eyes and AI Descriptions
The morning of the NYC Half started for Panek in a way that will sound familiar to just about every runner: He didn't have enough safety pins for his bib.
But other stuff was decidedly different. Panek was packing not one, but two pairs of smart glasses for the trip. And he was basically using them for the first time. After a short test run in Central Park, the engineers had tweaked the code overnight, with Panek receiving a ping the night before during dinner that his glasses had been updated.
At the starting line, he told the glasses he was beginning, and the Ray-Bans started narrating.
"There [are] two stripes on your left. You're on the right side of the double line," Panek says. "And it would tell me my stats. The first quarter mile, it said you're going out a little bit fast, as we all do."
But, he says, it was also giving him something more: A new sense of where he was.
During a normal race, "I'm just feeling my feet. I'm feeling the tether. I'm listening to my breathing," he says. He can ask his sighted guide to point out sights and describe fans, but they're usually too busy trying to keep him from falling or crashing.
With the AI description, though, the world opened up.
"It said, ‘there's runners over there, and they're wearing red T-shirts, and they're cheering…or it described the Brooklyn Bridge to me," he said. "Normally, when I'm on a bridge, I don't know that I'm on a bridge. I can feel something going up and down, but I can't see the steel above my head. It was describing, in great detail, this bridge to me."
A few miles into the race, Panek pressed a button on the frames to video call Jurek.
"I thought there might be a lag with the connectivity; there are thousands of runners in one place," he says. But the call was clear. "I could see cracks in the road. I could see things quick enough and with enough detail to say, ‘watch out for this runner coming by.'"
Jurek imagined a scenario where he could remotely coach multiple runners at once. He could be speaking with ultra athletes on a multi-view screen in the future, giving each pointers on upcoming terrain or fatigue management.
Panek's race wasn't all smooth sailing, though. He took a spill in an especially deep pothole at one point, and also needed to swap his glasses when the first pair's battery ran dry.
But as he crossed into the race's eleventh mile, he began to tear up.
"I thought, ‘this is pretty amazing,'" he says. "The ability to look around and ask what I see, and have it described to me. I'm running in New York, but when you're blind, you don't know if you're there or running in Cleveland, Ohio. Am I really in Central Park? Did I just turn through Columbus Circle?"
Around the same time, he spoke with Jurek for one of the last times. The champion ultra runner asked if he would want to talk again as he ran to the finish, but Panek demurred; he'd let the description from the glasses bring him home.
"Just knowing, wow, he's more independent now," Jurek says. "This could revolutionize a visually impaired person's life and experience."
This, Panek says, was the emotion that hit him as he crossed the finish line.
"I'm always grateful to my guides, but I just want to be able to run independently, and teach other people that it's possible," he says. "And I got really emotional for that. It's not just me that's running this race. As soon as I finish, there's another first where people who are blind or visually impaired will see this. It's going to help more people get out there and get running, and potentially use these glasses for good."
This story was originally published by Men's Journal on May 21, 2026, where it first appeared in the Health & Fitness section. Add Men's Journal as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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This story was originally published May 21, 2026 at 11:08 AM.