Crawling to the Finish Line

Ro’s Words of Encouragement is taking a short break over the Easter holiday, but I wanted to leave everyone with a great story to take into the weekend. I spotted this story on the ESPN show “Outside the Lines” last weekend:

Last November, the girls’ track team from a California high school entered the state championships with a chance to win it all, thereby earning their coach his record 8^th state championship in his 17-year career. The girls were motivated further by the fact that their coach had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease that June, which likely meant this season would be his last as their coach.

All five member of the team achieved extraordinary feats that day, but it was the actions of star runner Holland Reynolds that made the story national news. After leading her cross-country race for several miles, she became dehydrated and slowed, finally collapsing 6 feet short of the finish line. She needed to finish the race for her team to win the championship, but if anyone helped her up she would be disqualified.

So she crawled across the finish line.

“It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t finish,” [she] said. “You need to finish, because that’s the point.”[1]

Check out the full story here.

Have a great weekend,

Ro