Running Into You

Prologue

Running. Running, in my opinion, has got to be the best form of exercise. I mean, come on, it's cheap. All you need is a pair of tennis shoes and that's only if you live in a first world country in which case you don't even need that. It burns tons of calories and it makes you stronger. People, in general, love to run. We run when we're children and when we get older we either love it because we've been doing it for so long or we hate it because we haven't. I particularly love to run. I have run my whole life. My mom used to tell her friends that I never learned to walk. I just took off running. When I was young I ran everywhere I went and I was fast. I won every field day relay race in elementary and I was a coach's dream in track. This really paid off when I played baseball. Coach didn't care if I couldn't catch a beachball coming at me at two miles an hour as long as I could hit because once I was gone there was no stopping me.

My speed didn't win me any friends or celebrity status until I started football. In south Georgia we don't have much. We have farmland and if you're lucky enough to live far enough east we have miles of beaches. So football is important here. If you can play football you are a hometown super star and I could play football. Being the fastest player on my team I was the all-star running back and once I learned to catch I made all the touchdowns. The guys wanted to be me and the girls wanted to date me, but I wanted something else.

        I wanted to make it on my own. I wanted to prove that I didn't need my daddy's money to make it in life. Where I'm from there are not many people with money, in fact most of my friends are poor, but my daddy had money and lots of it. We had old money. Money that was brought down from generations. Generations of slave owners and then eventually lawyers. Five generations of lawyers. Good lawyers that were often sought after and made lots of money on big cases. My daddy likes to show off his money with flashy cars and vacation homes. This doesn't go over well with my friends who sometimes don't have food to eat and have to work long hours in high school to help pay the bills.

I wanted to prove to my friends, to my family, and to myself that I didn't need his money, that I was just as good as anyone else.

Learning came easy to me. I could absorb anything I read and comprehend it so I didn't need the football scholarship, but the football scholarship was something that I got on my own. It wasn't because I had money. It was because I practiced and worked my butt off. It also got me in the papers. That people could say to their neighbors 'I know him he goes to school with my kid'. It made my star power that much brighter. As a teenage boy being popular and a small town celebrity was the best feeling in the world. So I got a scholarship to UGA the pride of Georgia. I got better offers from other colleges in other states, but I didn't want to go to just any college I wanted to go to UGA and when they offered me a scholarship I took it without looking back.

Now there's one thing about football that I hated. I hated so much that I only lasted one season at UGA and never even played a game. Injuries. I hated more than anything getting hit. As much as I prepared for it and even when I knew it was coming I still hated it. In high school you play football with good ol' farm boys at best. They're big because they were breed to be, but in college they take the best from all over. The bigger the better and nothing really prepared me for college football linebackers. I was lucky, I was fast enough that I rarely got hit, but in college they're faster and they hit harder. I wasn't taken out in a game. I never even played a game. I was taken out at practice. I was taken out by my own teammate. When he tackled me it was like being hit by a freight train. I got knocked out cold. When I woke my knee was on fire and I knew something was wrong. The doctors told me I tore my ACL. I had heard about this happening to other athletes. People just shake it off like it's part of playing the game, but it still didn't prepare me for it. I took a hard look at my life and asked myself if this is what I really wanted. If it was worth the time I had to spend on the bench to wait for my time to play. To wait for my time to be a star and if I was willing to get injured while I waited. I decided that this isn't what I wanted. It took me six months to heal from my injury and I wasn't willing to risk it happening again or something worse. I quit playing football which meant I lost my scholarship. Now I could stay in college and pay for it with loans, like most students would do, or I could let my daddy pay for it.

I caved. I had no skill set to get a job and there was nothing I could do that would pay for UGA. So when he offered to pay for the rest of my education I didn't say no. This was a big step for us. I had never taken a handout from him before and when you give a little you give a lot. It's like he had been saving up all the money he has wanted to spend on me my whole life and he was desperate to cash in.

I had lost my celebrity status when I quit football. I lost my girlfriend and most of my college friends. I still helped coach second and third string so I was always around the game, but I wasn't part of the team anymore. I was okay with it because now I had time to do what I really liked and that was running.

I ran every race within fifty miles of me and I realized the simpler life wasn't so bad. I didn't want to be a flashy lawyer or anything that would put pressure on me to succeed. I just wanted time to do what I love. To make enough money to live a comfortable life.

In my life I have learned that I'm always running. Either I'm running towards something like a field goal or a finish line or I'm running away from something like my dad's money or a two hundred pound linebacker. It has always been black and white to me, no shades of grey. So why am I running towards something that I should be running away from?