You know how in high school there's numerous oral & written reports a student is assigned throughout the years? And how, oftentimes, themes within these reports connect & overlap? Wilma Rudolph (Amazon Instant Video link) is a woman who became the subject of such numerous reports for me throughout my high school years. Mom even noted rhetorically sometime during my senior year, "How many times have you recycled that report?" I wrote about her in Creative Writing as well as in English class. I prepared oral presentations on her in American Cultures (social studies) class & when the assignment was on a hero(ine). These assignments had to add up to nearly a dozen over the four years. The convenient part was I had already researched her history, I knew who she was, where she came from, what she'd accomplished. This was much of the reason I found inspiration in her; her ambition & drive as well as her ability to focus & know who she was & of what she was capable of accomplishing.
A long-distance runner myself (cross-country, the 1-mile, & 2-mile in track), she didn't seem to be a 100% accurate athletic match-up for me to idolize, & I remember feeling a bit down when a classmate asked me about my research who was a sprinter just as Wilma (link to DVD) had been. I remember feeling that I'd taken her choice, though this classmate had been mature about it. There were less than thirty of us in the class. None of us could select the same subject as a fellow classmate did for our report. I'd not learned of any long-distance running equivalent, or near equivalents, to the achievements of Wilma Rudolph, at least not in high school. A time long before Wikipedia & the like became available for easy, quick, comparable research.
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