Read an Excerpt
Ready to Run
That afternoon, after several hours of study, I shifted my focus from the thick law books to the treasured plane tickets, smiled, and shouted to Fred, “Let’s go jogging!”
This interruption was no shock to Fred, who was studying in his room. We often took a running break.
A few minutes later, we were out running on well-kept sidewalks that sliced through manicured lawns of an upscale neighborhood, west of downtown Houston.
From my days in Little League baseball to high school football, and an undefeated regular season in track, I had always loved to run. The challenge of running, and the physical exertion, always gave me a renewed vigor.
Whether it was athletics, mowing lawns in the summer, or hauling steel in a forge factory, I’d always felt a physical, mental, and emotional renewal from hard work. Believe me, running in the July heat in Houston was hard work.
It was a typical muggy afternoon, but windy and overcast. Fred and I headed down the sidewalk at a brisk pace. The burden of my studies began to fall off my shoulders with every stride.
We usually ran side by side, trading good-natured verbal jabs along the way. But whenever the route wasn’t wide enough, I found myself sprinting ahead. About ten minutes into our run, I noticed the sidewalk ahead was about to narrow. I moved in front of Fred.
One Second
The first shock was the sound—a loud explosion that sounded like a bomb had exploded about ten feet away. Reflexively, I turned my head to the right, where the sound originated. It was a tree. A big oak, well over fifty feet tall, with a trunk two or three feet wide—and an enormous crack at the base.
And the tree was falling exactly where I was running.
Think of the sense of panic you feel when you perceive imminent danger. That sudden sinking feeling in your stomach when your heart abruptly stops, then races rapidly. That moment of fright that makes your hair stand on end. Then multiply it times a hundred. That’s what I felt.
In a nanosecond, thoughts raced through my head.
If I stop or keep going straight, I’m gonna get clobbered, and I can’t go left because cars are parked there. Go right!
The next thing I knew, I was down. Flat on my back. The entire catastrophe—from the time I heard the sound until I hit the ground—lasted no more than a second.
The good news was that I was still conscious. The bad news was that I had not lost consciousness. The pain was immediate, excruciating, and unrelenting. I had broken bones in the past and had a concussion playing football. But this was altogether different.
The pain was magnified by my inability to breathe. I’d had the wind knocked out of me before but this was beyond comparison. Trying to take in air ripped me with stabbing pains. Any attempt to exhale was sheer torture. All I could muster were short, shallow gasps.
I didn’t know what had happened, but I could tell it was bad.
