Guest Column by Cathy Elliott

The famous runner Steve Prefontaine was once quoted as saying, “Most people run a race to see who is fastest. I run a race to see who has the most guts.”

“Pre,” as he was called, would most certainly have enjoyed Brad Keselowski’s gutsy performance in Good Sam RV Insurance 500 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race on August 7. Keselowski, sporting a broken left ankle swollen to roughly the size of a small tree, toughed it out for 500 miles to take the checkered flag at Pocono Raceway.

“I came here to win. When you let the pain get into your head that far that you don’t believe you can win anymore, you’ll never win. And I woke up this morning feeling like we could win the race … If you don’t feel that way, you’re never going to win at anything you do,” he said in an interview after the race.

That’s self-motivation, and it is a powerful thing, strong enough to get an injured athlete out of bed and ready to play when the rest of us would probably just reach for a box of tissues and call in sick for the day.

Continue reading “Pain Leads To Gain For Keselowski”