In high school, I ran track. I didn’t want to run track; they made me. If you wanted to play football in the fall (I did), then you had to run track in the spring (ugh). The event my coaches assigned to me was the 440-yard dash—the “quarter,” we called it, because it’s a quarter of a mile. One lap. 400 meters.
The 440 is a sprint, meaning you have to run the whole thing as fast as you can, every step. I remember our football coach yelling at us, “I don’t care if you die dead on that last 110, I want everything you have for the first 330.”
After every race, my lungs felt like they had been blow-torched. It always felt that way. It never got better. I hated it.
Somehow I got the goal in my mind that I needed to run a quarter in less than 60 seconds. I think my coach might have told me if I could run a sub-60 in a meet, he wouldn’t make me run them anymore. You’d think I would remember that part, but I don’t. All I remember was that sub-60 was my goal, and for whatever reason, I was committed to it.
Sub-60 wasn’t an unreasonable goal. I had come close. It was definitely within reach. I had just never done it.
One day late in the season, at the end of a race in Healdton, Oklahoma, my coach walked over toward me with his stopwatch out and a big grin on his face. I couldn’t wait to see it. Was today finally the day I beat this thing?
Nope. The stopwatch said 60.1.
I remember thinking, just one step faster anywhere around that track and I’d have done it. Just one step. One. Step.
And that’s the closest I ever got. I never broke 60. I would be one step short for the rest of my life.
It bothered me. It was a failure at something that mattered at the time, but only superficially. It’s not like I lost a scholarship over it or anything like that. But I’ve thought about it a lot, and I still think of it today. My 60.1 reminds me when I need reminding, that sometimes all it takes is just one little step to make a big difference.
So here’s something to think about: What if the race I ran in Healdton was really a 59.9, and my coach just wasn’t very good at stopwatching? Would that have changed my life?
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