Despite devastating vision loss early in her professional career, Linda Goodspeed has managed to overcome significant adversity to become a successful writer and author. In her personal life, she was one of the first, maybe the only, single blind people to navigate the international adoption process when she adopted a two-year-old baby girl from Russia. Goodspeed grew up in Rutland, Vermont, a normal sighted person who enjoyed alpine skiing and other outdoor activities. She graduated from the University of Vermont and began her journalism career in 1980 at the Rutland, Vermont Daily Herald. "When I started at the Herald, reporters wrote their stories on manual typewriters. Photos were black and white, and had to be developed by hand in a darkroom," Goodspeed recalled.

Linda Goodspeed cross country skiing at Mountain Top resort in Chittenden, Vermont.

At the Herald, Goodspeed was named the paper's first female sports editor, and began a lifelong interest in ski writing. In 1984, the newspaper bought a laptop computer at Radio Shack and sent Goodspeed to Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia to cover the Winter Olympics. Goodspeed has covered skiing on 3 continents, written a book on the history and development of alpine skiing in the U.S., (Pico, Vermont, 1987, 2002), and won awards for her ski writing, including Honorable Mention as the Outstanding Ski Writer in the U.S. and Canada.

In the late 1980s, however, Goodspeed's journalism career nearly ended when she began losing her eyesight.

"At that time, adaptive technology for blind people consisted primarily of a slate and stylus for writing Braille," Goodspeed said. "I had to give up driving. I had never met a blindperson. I had no idea what I was going to do or how I was going to do it."

The fun abruptly ended in late 1989, however, when the real estate market crashed.

"We were a bimonthly magazine, and we went from our largest issue ever to less than half that size within the span of just two months," Goodspeed said. "That's how fast things constricted."

Fortunately, by then, Goodspeed had earned her Master's degree in Reporting on Science and Medicine from Boston University and was ready to move into Boston's even more booming health care industry. She worked for several years as a writer and editor at Massachusetts General Hospital, and later as Publications Director at Health Care For All, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization working to improve access to health care.

Goodspeed and her daughter Masha, now 13, moved back to Rutland, Vermont in 2005, and added a Cocker Spaniel named Ziggy (Zhivago) to their family.

In Vermont, Goodspeed has a wide-ranging freelance writing business. She continues her interest in ski writing as a longtime columnist for Ski Area Management Magazine. She also writes a long-running weekly newspaper column on residential real estate for the Community Newspaper Company, a large group of daily and weekly newspapers in and around Boston. She writes for many other publications on business, real estate, health care and other topics. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, Boston Phoenix, the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, Boston Business Journal, Ski Racing, the Warren Group of publications and national and regional engineering firms.

"We love all the outdoor recreation and activities in Vermont, and thanks to the Internet, phones and email, it really is possible to work almost anywhere," Goodspeed said.

Goodspeed is an excellent skier. She enjoys many outdoor activities, including swimming, hiking, tandem biking, canoeing, kayaking, snowshoeing and many other sports. She is a member of the board of directors at Vermont Adaptive Ski and Sports.

Linda Goodspeed can be contacted via e-mail.