A BLIND athlete has joined 200 people to complete a 26km run in Alsace.

Clément Gass covered the Kochersberg trail armed with a special GPS device and a white cane.

His GPS uses a voice to guide him and is a more accurate version of those typically used on smartphones, giving directions in terms of a clock-based system, such as warning that in 60m the path turns off at 3 o’clock.

It is being developed by a research team at Strasbourg who say that the test run by the 27-year-old athlete was a world first.

Unfortunately the device malfunctioned during the run, leading Mr Gass to complete the course in three hours and 43 minutes – far off the time he was hoping to achieve.

On June 22, Mr Glass plans to take part in a six-stage 80km ramble across the Vosges mountains, accompanied by other people with sight problems.

Photo: the countryside of Kochersberg by Ralph Hammann (wikimedia)