A blind swimmer has lapped Mackinac Island, covering the 8.2-mile perimeter in more than nine hours, tethered the whole way to a guide swimmer by a system he worked out himself.

Scott Lacey, an athlete from Kalamazoo, Michigan, is believed to be the first visually impaired person to swim the whole way around the island, and he did it on Aug. 9.

He has been an athlete all his life, and he lost his sight in his mid-20s.

The Boston Marathon and Ironman races are already behind him, and a long open-water swim was the next thing he went after.

For Mackinac he built a tether system that connected him to a guide swimmer, so that he could hold a line through water he could not see.

The training ran for months at a Kalamazoo athletic club, starting with half-hour intervals and building until he could stay in the pool for five hours at a stretch.

“I’d like people to move in a direction where the expectation isn’t that a person with a disability can’t do it,” Scott said.