Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [62]
This was heady stuff for a kid, and after talking to my mom, I was always on the lookout for him. I’d get excited when I saw him walking into the grocery store (I’d memorized how he looked) or into a restaurant, but I couldn’t summon the courage to introduce myself. When I learned that informal, neighborhood track meets were held at the local high school, I wanted to go because I suspected that he might be there as well. Sure enough, he was there, and when I saw him, I was transfixed. I’d watch him walk and think to myself, “That’s how the fastest man in the world moves,” and try to imitate it. Needless to say, I wanted to impress him with my talent, but to be honest, it never happened. Billy had three daughters and his youngest competed. Unlike me, however, she was great, and never once lost a single race.
Learning about Billy’s past led me to read about other great runners. I dreamed of running like Henry Rono, Sebastian Coe, or Steve Ovett, but that’s all it was—a dream. Yet I went out for the track team, and gradually I became friends with Harold Kuphaldt, a junior who was also on the team.
Like Billy, Harold was almost a legend, albeit a high school one. Harold was one of the fastest runners in the country (he would record the nation’s fastest time in the two mile for juniors, and hold the American junior record for a while), and, as with Billy, I idolized him from afar. Again, there’s a world of difference between the lives of freshman and upper classmen. Yet one afternoon, toward the end of the season, the team was running as a group and I found myself running alongside Harold. We started chatting until Harold eventually grew quiet.
“I’ve been watching you run,” Harold said to me after a few moments of companionable silence. “You can be great if you work at it. Not just good, but great. You’re a natural at this.”
I remember nothing about the run after that. It seemed as if I were floating, carried along by the words he’d said. There was nothing anyone could have said that would have meant more to me than what he’d told me. Not only did his words feed my fantasies, but they also touched the deeper core within myself, the one that always sought approval from my parents. I could be great, he’d said. I’m a natural . . .
I vowed at that moment to make his words prophetic, and instead of spending the summer goofing around as I usually did, I decided to train instead. I trained hard—harder than I’d trained during the season—and the harder I worked, the harder I wanted to work. I ran twice a day, often in temperatures exceeding a hundred degrees, and frequently ran until I vomited from exertion. Despite Harold’s words, I wasn’t a natural athlete, but what I lacked in talent, I made up for with desire and effort.
My brother, meanwhile, was working and earning money; in the past couple of years, he’d matured a bit and was rapidly becoming a man. And a handsome man at that. Combined with his natural confidence and charm, he quickly became irresistible to the opposite sex. The fact that he had a steady girlfriend didn’t seem to matter; girls flocked to his side or admired him from afar. My brother was essentially a babe magnet.
Not so for me. I was shorter than Micah, with skinny arms and legs, and had none of the easy confidence of my brother. It didn’t matter, however. Running offered me the chance to excel if I worked hard enough, and I began focusing on it to the exclusion of everything else that summer.
Well, almost everything. I was as worried about Micah as my parents were. Toward the end of the summer, after much lobbying, I convinced him to join the cross-country team with me. The team, led by Harold, was expected to be one of the best in the state, and would travel to meets in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles, where, after the meets, we would have the chance to visit amusement parks or boardwalks—places we would ordinarily never have the money or excuse to visit. “All you have to do is run fast enough to be in the top seven,” I