Dream Runner Read Free

bright braided thread around her right ankle, a gift from the kids.
    And now she had a special gift for them. “I qualify,” she said again, just loving the sound of the words.
    “Not quite,” her coach said. “You’re only a couple of points short. A good local race and you’re in. This is your year, babe. There’s no denying you. Just hit a solid 10K, pick up the points you need, and you’re good to go.”
    “The Peachtree,” Marlea said without hesitation. She had already spent a lot of her off time working with her kids and their families on 2, 5, and 10K runs during the school year. Her children, labeled and sometimes limited by their learning disabilities, loved to run. And having them run with her sometimes gave her an advantage in the classroom. A 10K was a longer distance than she preferred to run, but Marlea knew it was absolutely doable.
    “If I gotta run one more, then that’s a good one.” She stopped there. No need telling Libby that she would run through hell in gasoline drawers if it would help get that Olympic gold. One final race to run to qualify for the Olympic Trials and it’s the Peachtree Road Race—a piece of cake. Fourth of July in Atlanta would be one hot piece of cake.
    * * *
    Wind sprints were the most irritating thing in the world but…if they kept a brother fast enough to stay in the NFL, then he would run wind sprints until he couldn’t move. A running back, AJ Yarborough knew he had outlasted a lot of the best, but he also knew that a knee, blown two years earlier, still took some pampering.
    “I take care of you, and you take care of me,” he bargained with his right knee. “It takes two, you know.” The knee didn’t make an audible reply, but AJ felt it twinge, and slowed to a jog. “No need overdoin’ it,” he cautioned himself. Four months out of surgery and a contract up for review—this was no time to jam up your knee, especially with new kids out there every year making it harder and harder to compete, particularly when you looked at players like LaDainian Tomlinson, Larry Johnson, and Shaun Alexander.
    “The new guys are all so damned young, and not in a refreshing way like the guys who came along with me.” True enough, most of those who started with him were done; except for the rare ones like Ahman Green or Warrick Dunn, most of them were retired warhorses. But these young ones, they were fire-eaters. The boys weren’t just young and fast, they were smart, and learning more every time out. They were the competition, the contenders.
    They were the future.
    The future. “Humph, that used to sound like, ‘once upon a time’ to me. Now it sounds like a deadline.” Truth be told, coming back from injury, it sounded like the end of a lifelong passion. At thirty-four, AJ knew the career wouldn’t last forever—but that didn’t stop him from wishing and hoping for the best. So he ran harder. Liking the solid sound of his feet against the road, he sniffed cool air and ignored the tiny electrical jolt in his knee. “Doc said I’d feel a little somethin’ there,” he recalled. “Least I know that my knee is working now.”
    The click in his knee paced his run and made him analyze his whole body. Taking inventory as he ran, he was pretty sure that everything seemed to work right, but he could practically hear his knee. The surgical reminder sounded almost mechanical to AJ’s ear. “A machine,” he complimented himself, looking for the silver lining and enjoying the free flow of his healthy body as he ran. “This man is a machine.”
    Following the rolling hills of his southwest Atlanta property, that was easy enough to say, but he sure hadn’t felt like a machine during that last game. That was the one where he had been close enough to taste the rushing record. Instead, he had taken the hit—a hard one, right at the knees. It sent him airborne and he had to be helped from the field in anguish.
    Still running, he heard the steps of another runner.