Through My Eyes by Tim Tebow Read Free Book Online Page B

school. There was only one that interested me: Jacksonville Trinity Christian Academy.
    I was the third in our family to play sports at Trinity Christian. Since we were all homeschooled, we needed a way and place to participate in sports, and Trinity had provided that and had been a good home for us for years. As if the three of us playing wasn’t enough, for years my dad had been videotaping every one of Trinity’s games for the coaches’ use, so it really was a family legacy that we were building at Trinity. And we continued to build it when I, as the third Tebow boy, began playing quarterback on Trinity’s JV football team in the eighth grade.
    We were undefeated during my eighth-grade year, and I was called up to the varsity team at the end of that season. (The varsity season lasts longer.) I didn’t play at all that year on the varsity, however, but was biding my time for ninth grade.
    After the season ended, I continued to train and lift as much as I could, but it wasn’t until I was preparing for my freshman-year season at Trinity that I realized how much progress I’d been making. Before going into ninth grade, I went to a youth camp that featured, among other events, an arm-wrestling competition. Robby was back from college and had gone along to serve as a counselor for the camp, while Peter and I were there as campers.
    That competition was one of the moments when I realized that all my extra hard work was beginning to pay off, providing me with an advantage I hadn’t planned for. It was no surprise that Robby, as a college football player, made the finals at a high school camp, but as someone about to be a freshman, I certainly didn’t expect to make it. Sure enough, though, I found myself in the finals against my brother. Of all people, my big brother.
    The finals of the arm-wrestling competition? Me, about to be a freshman in high school, against my brother Robby, a college football player, and six years older than me.
    Funny, I just can’t remember who won.
    It was apparent, though, that all the additional training I’d been doing was having a real and noticeable impact on my strength. Seeing that progress and the results of it in different settings made me even more motivated to work hard.
    Heading into that first year of high school football, we went on a church-planned weekend called the “Burly Man Retreat,” in Hilliard, Florida, located about thirty minutes north of Jacksonville and just inside the Florida–Georgia border. The events of that weekend have become the stuff of family legend and probably illustrate as well as anything just how competitive I am.
    But there also can be a downside to that competitiveness.
    This retreat included adult men as well as students and offered a tug-of-war, wood chopping, and a number of other events. I’m guessing the church didn’t even bother to try and get insurance to cover anybody or the church for that weekend—what insurance company would want to underwrite such events? Anyway, at the end of the night on Saturday, they had scheduled an arm-curl competition. As I recall, it was a fifteen-pound curl bar with two ten-pound weights on each end, weighing in at fifty-five pounds. I kept sliding back in the line as guys were taking their turns, because I was hoping to be the last one to go, in order to know the number to beat.
    The number of repetitions that guys were doing kept climbing with each new guy. Thirty-five, forty, fifty. I think it was around fifty-five repetitions by the time it reached the guy who was next to last . . . me. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to slide all the way to the end of the line, so I was going to have to put up a number that the guy behind me—the last guy in the competition—couldn’t beat. Better yet, I figured that I’d put up a number that he wouldn’t want to beat—and that way beat him before he even got started.
    And so I began curling the bar as fast as I could. Thankfully, form didn’t matter, just