Preface: Spencer is a 14 year old freshman in high school and wrote this paper in September of 2006 as part of an English class assignment. In his first year of running, he has already run a 4:59 mile and made it to the 2006 Cross-Country Nationals in Spokane, Washington.

          It was just a small race. One that mom told me about.  The night before it happened.  I thought she was crazy.  I didn’t run.  I wasn’t in shape.  And she was telling me about a race less than twelve hours before I had to run.  Yeah, right.  She said they have door prizes.  Many  prizes.  Good prizes.  Like baseball tickets.  I liked that.  Prizes for people who didn’t win.  It made me want to run.  Just for a prize.

          The gun went off and we started running.  It was just kids.  That’s all I had to run against.  But I was just a kid too.  And a mile seemed a long way away.  I didn’t like it that I was running to a place I couldn’t see yet.  We started slow.  But just at first.  After a while I started going a little faster.  Just a little.  Just to see what I could do.  How fast I could go.  I passed one kid.  Then another.  Then another.  I realized after a while that I had a great number of people behind me.  I also realized that there weren’t many people in front of me.  As we came down the street I could see it.  The finish line.   Now I could see where I was going.  Where the journey ended.  I passed a few more people and found out I had come in third.  That wasn’t bad.  I couldn’t really stand up very well at the end but I had enjoyed the result.  It wasn’t a 1^st place victory.  But it still felt like a win.  To me.

          It takes people years to find out what they want in life.  Years.  It took me a few minutes.  People can spend half their lives deciding on what they want to do with the other half.  Half their lives.  I knew.  I knew after that race.  What I wanted to do.  I wanted to do things people didn’t think possible.  Including myself.  Running for a long time, or running fast, was something that I had not thought I could do.  But I could. 

          I had played other sports.  In all those sports, I had not been the best.  Not even close.  But now I could be. 

          In that race I found a new sport.  I found something I was good at.  I found something to do.  I even found a coach.  I wouldn’t know it until later.  But I had found a coach.  A coach that would, and still does, push me to run faster and harder than I ever thought I could do.

          All that happened in one race.  In just a few minutes.