Blind veteran power-lifts his way to world games

PHILADELPHIA – As Charles King adds weight to the bench press bar, it's easy to forget the Philadelphia man is blind.

He lifts the 250-pound bar over this head, then holds a perfect squat position.

He moves through the Fairmount Park Carriage House's gym, avoiding collisions with machines, chairs and stacks of weights.

At 5-foot-9 and 208 pounds, King seems invincible.

After everything the formerly homeless veteran has endured in 20 years, he just might be.

He may be on track to compete in the International Blind Sports Association's World Games in South Korea next month, but he'll still tell you he's a "dead man."

He lived on the streets, lost his daughter in 2000 and battles addiction, prostate cancer, arthritis and diabetes.

"Everybody has to be passionate about something in life to keep them going," said Logan Township resident GW Stilwell, coordinator of the blind rehabilitation staff at Philadelphia VA Medical Center.

It took 64 years and lots of support from Stilwell and the VA, but King finally found his passion — power lifting.

He's raising money on GoFundMe.com for travel expenses for the week-long competition. In two months, he's collected $3,989 of his ambitious $12,000 goal.

Stilwell remembers the first time he saw King in the mid-1990s.

Then homeless, King was just 150 pounds — a "classic street person on drugs" — when University of Pennsylvania police brought him, frost-bitten, to the VA emergency room, Stilwell recalled.

Most of King's vision was already gone. His diagnosis — hereditary acute glaucoma — set him into a spiral of depression, alcoholism and drug abuse. He left his family to live on the streets, hoping to die there, he admitted.

"He had a quality about him. You could tell he was going to want to beat that and do something with himself," Stilwell said.

Over two years, Stilwell arranged for addiction rehab and three months of intensive training to help King adjust to blindness.

"I've been blind for 25 years. Just in the last 12 years or so I've come to understand what blindness is as far as being able to navigate and accept it," said King, a post-Vietnam war veteran honorably discharged from the Army for health reasons.

"I call it maturing into the disability."

At Stilwell's suggestion, King, then 48, enrolled in Philadelphia Community College in 1998.

He started lifting in the college gym. A gym employee would walk the blind man from machine to machine. Exercise helped relieve the frustration of a new life with a disability.

In 2008, Stilwell set King up with Flourtown, Pa., professional power lifter Joe Braca, a deadlift record-holder with a 589-pound lift.

King was skeptical of his own abilities. Braca had never before trained a blind athlete.

Training started slowly, with Braca creating plans with his eyes closed to feel balance without sight.

Braca would tap King's chest to indicate where the bench press bar should touch his chest. The coach would get into a squatting position, letting King touch his knees and back to feel the positioning.

It took King six months to perfect his squat form using a light broom handle before he could graduate to a weighted bar.

"He's gotten a lot more confident," Braca said.

In seven years, King has worked up to 285-pound squats, 319 pounds on the bench press and a 451-pound deadlift.

In 2012, he set three world records at the United States Association of Blind Athletes for squatting with 264 pounds, bench pressing 281 pounds and deadlifting 407 pounds.

King works out at three gyms, three days a week, taking multiple buses to the Carousel House, Philadelphia Community College and Braca's Underground Gym.

On Tuesdays Stilwell switches gears from VA case manager to friend, driving King 45 minutes to Flourtown for his workout.

"Our relationship changed when he got cancer," Stilwell said.

King was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2005. He graduated from community college with an associate's degree in social gerontology and a certificate in mental health services weeks after his cancer surgery.

"We've spent a lot of time together and talked about a lot of things," Stilwell said.

During their hour drive, they talk about families — Stilwell's daughter's in Gloucester County and King's sons in Philadelphia.

On the way home, they compare workouts — Stilwell's run and King's weightlifting session.

"Every time we get in the car I ask what he's been eating," Stilwell said.

"I'm more or less the manager, making sure all the loose ends are connected."

At the VA, Stilwell oversees visual impairment services for more than 600 Philadelphia-area veterans. Activities, including fitness, are a major part of adjusting to life with blindness, he explained.

"There's a huge component of denial in blindness," Stilwell said.

"They need an acceptance level, and Charles got there."

Whether or not the funds are raised for King and Braca to journey to South Korea next month, they're going even if they put the trip on credits cards, King said.

The Challenged Athletes Foundation donated $3,500. King hopes to raise enough money to return the donation to the foundation.

"I'm going to have fun," King said.

"After all I've been through, I deserve to have some fun."