Who Are You?

Who are you at your core, what is the story that you tell yourself or the one that represents the fire burning deep inside you?

I'm going to tell you a story that, in my 44 years of life, I have never told before. Only the people who were there to witness it were aware of it. I never spoke of it again. I'm not sure why, but I was recently reminded of it and so I'm sharing it with you as a representation of what the answer to this question, "who are you?" looks like.

When I was a freshman in high school, I was scrawny. Maybe 155 pounds, 5 foot 9 inches tall, and a year younger than everyone else because I started school early and my birthday was late.

I played baseball growing up and was a four-sport athlete my freshman year, but I certainly wasn’t world class, especially compared to seniors who were, let’s face it, twice my size and strength, and 5 years older than me.

So, cut to freshman year track. I ran the 200 meter, 400 meter, and 4x400 meter relay. The 400 was my race, which was crazy because it means you sprint an entire lap around the track. It’s a quarter mile. Car manufacturers make 10-second cars (remember Fast & The Furious?). Michael Johnson was the gold medal winner, if you recall him from the Olympics. That’s the race.

On this day, it was the end of track practice. The entire team worked out together, freshman, sophomores, juniors, seniors. We were all gassed from running sprints for the last hour or however long.

The coach wanted us to do one more race.

Now, I’m not sure what got into me that day. But I think I was just pissed. I was pissed that everyone was celebrating these seniors, some of whom were All City and one who may have been All American. He was a star in football, basketball, etc and everyone in the city knew his name.

On this day, though, I wanted to prove to everyone that the quiet, scrawny kid could take down a giant, and force them to re-think what was possible. In short, I wanted to show them who I was.

So there was maybe 5 or 10 of us lined up at the starting line and we were going to run one final 400 meter lap around the track. I decided then and there I was going to win the race.

The coach said, “Go!” and I took off. I pushed all the energy I had left into that race, sprinted around the track and this All American senior was stunned he was getting beat by this no-name ant who’s name he didn’t know.

So yah, I kicked his ass that day. Finished ahead of him, and everyone on the team, including the coach, was stunned.

Granted, I walked into the stairwell back at the school and threw up mightily afterwards. But I won that day.

Nobody ever talked about that day again. I never did. I didn’t have to. The show of will did that for me. And I forgot about it for 25 years.

So, that’s who I am.

But the question remains: who are you?