I want to start today with the story. When I was in elementary school I was part of a

community track and field team. I did the jumps and a few of the hurdles but my favorite

event was the 4 by 100

relay. That's the one where there's 4 runners, each of you do a 100-yard

dash and you make one complete lap around the track. The hardest part about

relay races is the passing of the baton.

It's something you work on all the time.

The key is the passing lane.

What happens there is one runner starts here and there's a place a mark on the on the track where the previous runner as soon as he hits it this runner takes off

The goal is to get to full speed so that by the time the previous runner catches up to you,

he can hand the baton to you and there's not a missed step.

Our 4 by 100 relay team wasn't anything big, but for a bunch of elementary school kids, we thought we were pretty fast.

In fact, by the end of the season, we had qualified to participate in a regional meet on campus at UCLA.

We thought we'd reached the big time. We were preparing,

stretching, warming up, and then something that the second runner said to me, I was

the third, which I found out later I I think, is the slowest of it for. But the something the second

runner said to me made me a little nervous. He asked, which hand are you going to take the

baton in? I looked at him in disbelief and said, well my right hand, like I have always done. We're

going to do it just like we've practiced and ran every other meet all season long. I didn't

think anything of it. But as we ran the race, the first runner did great,

the second runner did great. As soon as he hit that mark that we put on the track, I took off running.

There comes a moment where the previous runner yells,

...