Blind Cross-Country Runner Overcoming Obstacles

December 1, 2010 /
9NEWS.com (Denver, Colo.)

ARVADA – Just the thought of it is enough to cause 15-year-old Kinsasha Zamora to laugh out loud.

There she is, in the middle of the park, fully stumped. Most of her competitors have long ago finished. She knows she’s lost. Do I go this way? What about that way? Where the heck am I supposed to go?

The sophomore at Arvada High School will tell you those questions have managed to enter her mind more than once over the course of her relatively brief cross-country running career. And yet, she’s still laughing when she starts to tell you about the “horror” of it all.

“I’m proud of it actually,” Kinsasha said with a smile. “I just run and run.”

Even some of Kinsasha’s teammates are unaware of the fact that the teenager is legally blind. They are certainly aware of the fact that Kinsasha isn’t one to call it a day halfway through the race.

“The only one I didn’t finish was when I had a seizure,” Kinsasha said.

She’s still smiling when she says that.

Kinsasha has dealt with more challenges in her life than most people five times her age. Shortly after she was born, she stopped breathing for 32 minutes.

When she was six, her mother noticed her daughter was an excellent reader for her age, but always seemed to hold the book a few inches away from her eyes. “Uveitis,” a swelling and irritation of the middle layer of the eye, a doctor would tell the family.

A few years back, a doctor trying to work on her eyes did something that caused her to rapidly lose her vision. Then last year, doctors found a cancerous tumor growing inside of her head.

Kinsasha admits some of her earlier years were a bit rough.

“In middle school, I was called a freak. Kids asked if I was contagious,” she said.

Thankfully, she says, those years are in the past.

She credits her friends, her teachers and her coaches at Arvada High School for a lot of that.

“Everyday, without fail, she comes in and her hands are shaking, because she’s so excited to tell me something about her day,” the school’s yearbook advisor Kassidy Hetzel said. “It makes my day.”

John Howes is the cross country coach at Arvada. “[Kinsasha] never did run a race last year, but she’d always come to practice.”

Then this year, Coach Howes and Kinsasha decided together that it was time to get her out on the runs.

“A story like this,” he said, “is more about life.”

During the last race of the year for the junior varsity team, Kinsasha’s dad ran with her. They only got lost once.

Hetzel becomes a bit teary-eyed when she thinks of this year at Arvada.

When asked what she wants for “one of my favorite students of all time,” Hetzel said, “to know that high school was more than just essays, that high school was fun; that you had people who really love you. I hope I’m at her wedding in 20 years.”

Seconds after saying that, Kinsasha gives Hetzel a big hug.

“I love you Ms. Hetzel,” Kinsasha said.

“I have never met someone who has overcome so many obstacles and still have a positive attitude to come out,” assistant cross country coach Carrie Olson said.

Kinsasha’s mom knows there remain even more obstacles ready to take her daughter off her current path. Later this month, doctors in Nashville will attempt to remove the tumor.

“If they can get it all, then we should be good,” Kinsasha’s mother Melissa Zamora said. “If they can’t, then we’ll just have to go from there.”

Kinsasha insists she’s not worried.

There are plenty more races to run. Next semester, she says she’s going to try track. Her doctors might not be happy with that decision, but Kinsasha says she’ll overrule them.

“[One of my doctors] didn’t want me to run cross country because he felt like I could get hurt. But I could get hurt walking, I could get hurt talking. Are you just going to stick me in a plastic bubble?” she said.

She’s smiling when she says that. Soon, everyone else in the room is smiling. It just might be the only thing truly contagious thing about her.


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