Music booms through a steel door and echoes down a long, cavernous hallway as folks shuffle into a grey industrial building in midtown Toronto on a recent freezing night.
It's dark and there are no arrows or signs pointing the way to the slick, high-tech space for WattsUp Cycling, an endurance training facility for novice and diehard athletes.
So for this group, it's almost literally a case of the blind leading the blind, with the sighted people extending an arm to the visually impaired men and women who have come to sweat, spin and often cuss their way to a higher level of fitness.
They are part of the Blind Guys Tri Team, a groundbreaking group of 30 Canadians, aged 16 to 66, with varying stages of vision loss who will take part this summer in the third annual Joe's Team Triathlon, a fundraiser for cancer research at Princess Margaret Hospital.
While people with vision loss have competed individually in countless sports, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind says the Blind Guys Tri is the first team of vision-impaired athletes and non-athletes to train and compete together.
Seated on rows of mounted tandem bikes in front of a giant television screen that monitors pace and time are Delano Brown (blind after being stabbed in the eye with a pencil), Elizabeth Hurman (who has retinitis pigmentosa and 5 per cent vision), and Brian McLean (same disease, 7 per cent vision).
They are are matching their cycling tempo to their "guides," the same volunteers who will lead them through a 750-metre swim on Lake Joseph, a five-kilometre run, and a 20-kilometre bike ride. They will be tethered together with their guides in the water, and sharing a bike on the road.
"The hardest part for me - no question - is the swimming," huffs 52-year-old Ms. Hurman, sweat dripping off her chin as she and her partner negotiate a steep hill simulated from video footage of the 2001 Tour de France. "I've never learned how to do a single stroke - and a mermaid I am not," she says with a laugh. "I'm a sinker."
Mr. Brown, who is 37 and has recently run two half-marathons, likewise describes the pool sessions as "the toughest workout I've ever done." But he signed up for the July 11 event because cancer is a good cause ("I've lost my mom and stepmother to cancer"). It's also an opportunity for Mr. Brown, who lives in socially assisted housing in downtown Toronto, to give back to others in need - a sentiment echoed by many of the other racers.
The CNIB credits the formation of the Blind Guys Tri primarily to three men - Joe Finley (who was diagnosed with cancer of the nasopharynx in the summer of 2004, and founded the Joe's Team Triathlon in 2007), Newfoundland singer-songwriter Terry Kelly (an Order of Canada recipient and one of three blind people in the world to have run a mile in less than five minutes), and Tim Tremain, Mr. Kelly's guide.
After Mr. Kelly - who is the Blind Guys team captain - completed Joe's Team Triathlon last summer - the three men sat down ("over a thousand beers," Mr. Finley quips) and hatched the plan to solicit interest among other visually impaired people.
Mr. Finley is not sure where the magic number 30 came from, but he figures that in his hops haze it seemed like a "workable number" at the time.
With help from the CNIB (and word of mouth), the spots filled up almost instantaneously. Demand is so strong among Mr. Finley's friends to be guides that he's had to turn scores of people away.
