Accessibility · Social Impact
The blind runner who helped build the glasses that called his race
New York City
Thomas Panek had already finished the NYC Half with the help of guide dogs. In March, Panek ran it again with AI glasses calling the turns, a safety runner alongside, and a coach watching from Colorado.
The person and the place
Thomas Panek noticed something was wrong young. "I was doing things like everybody else does, riding a bike or running, and I'd break my arms, and bump into things," Panek told amNewYork. "People just thought I was clumsy, and what was really going on was that I was experiencing vision loss." Legally blind by the early twenties, Panek went to Lighthouse Guild in New York at 26 for a first cane and then a guide dog, and now runs the organization as president and chief executive.
The problem they cared about
Running meant borrowing somebody else's eyes. Panek had pushed at that before, finishing the 2019 NYC Half with the help of guide dogs. The open question was whether the course itself, the turns, the water stops, the crowd, could reach a blind runner without a person out front reading it aloud.
The agency moment
Panek worked directly with Meta to customize a pair of AI glasses for a race course, and was clear about how that work should go. It matters, Panek told CBS News New York, that the devices are "developed by people who are blind, for people who are blind." "That's the first time that kind of approach has been taking place."
What changed, with evidence
On March 15, 2026, Panek ran the 13.1 miles of the United Airlines NYC Half from Brooklyn to Central Park with the glasses calling the course, the water stops, the turns, and the landmarks. Two other people were in it. Jed Laskowitz ran alongside as a safety runner for Achilles, and the ultra-marathoner Scott Jurek watched the race through Panek's sight line from home in Colorado and coached into it. Panek's own accounting is precise: "I had a safety runner, Jed Laskowitz, who ran on behalf of Achilles, but at the end of the day, that was the first time I had run semi-independently since I was a boy." The stretch Panek called the most emotional was hearing the glasses describe the people watching and what shirts they were wearing.
The move worth copying
Michael Cush, who was born legally blind and is chief program officer at Visions in New York, teaches other blind and low-vision New Yorkers to use tools like these, and keeps the claim the right size. A cane or a guide dog is not being replaced. "The goal is more choices, more independence." The portable part here is not the glasses. Those took a corporate engineering team to build. Panek emphasizes involving the people who will use a thing in making it. Know someone who got into that room and changed what came out of it? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"I always want to do it on my own. I've been able to achieve that dream." — Thomas Panek, CBS News New York
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