The Final 10 Meters

The sport that I had the best memory with was track. My junior year our 4x400 meter relay team had qualified for the state track meet after winning our region. The state meet consisted of two days of competition, the qualifying day and the finals day. Each event started out with 16 teams. The top four teams in each of the two heats would go on to qualify for the final day. Our team ran in the first heat, we were lined up in lane seven. We were all nervous because we knew that if we qualified we would finish in the top four in the state of Ohio. Once the gun went off if all turned into adrenaline. We were able to run a good qualifying race to come in second and go onto the final day.

On the final day the weather was marvelous, Jesse Owen’s Stadium was filled to the max, the atmosphere was electric. I ran the first leg of the race for our team. I stood in our lane with my heart-pounding ready to go. The starter calls out, “Runners on your mark,” all eight of us take to our blocks, another command “Get set,” we rise to our sprinting positions, “Bang,” the gun fires. The race is underway; you can hear the crowd yelling for their team in excitement. As I come down the final stretch of my leg we are in fourth place. I hand the baton of to Dom and he takes off; as Dom comes down the stretch we have moved up to third. Taylor takes the handoff from Dom and moves us up to second position. The final exchange of the baton is made between Taylor and Taylor. We maintain our second place position coming down the final 100 meters. As Taylor sprints down the final 10 meters, a kid from another school passes him with three meters to go. Even though the silver metal would have been much better to look at we were happy with our bronze, third place metal.