He looks down at his 2-year-old, off-brand Nike tennis shoes.
Everyone else is wearing professional racing spikes.
He turns to the gun-shooter. “How many laps am I running? How far is this race gonna be?”
After two minutes and 18 seconds, he finishes first.
Senior John Corder ran the 800 M Track and Field race for the first time in eighth grade. Less than a year later, he would be ranked 39th in the state of Texas and compete in the Junior Olympics.
In February of 2019, Corder’s eighth grade Pin Oak Middle School football coach, one of the head track coaches, asked him to run at the district championship track meet the next day. The coach invited Corder “just for fun” to “see if he had a good time running.”
“I show up to the meet the very next day,” Corder said. “I've never been on a track before. Never really run before. We get to the track line, and this is a race called the 800. I don't know what that is.”
At the sound of the gunshot, Corder was quickly left behind from the rest of the group, second to last place. Building up speed, Corder raced past his competitors and took first place.
“I crossed the line and I was like, ‘Oh I just won that race,’” Corder said. “I was like, ‘Okay, maybe I’m good at this.’”
He then tried competing in hurdles and once again placed first. To end his first track meet, Corder anchored a team relay to a first-place win, adding another tally to his winning streak.
“That was my big moment," Corder said. “I was more confused than excited, I think.”
Corder now runs for the Wings, a competitive track club of roughly 750 runners from ages 8 to 18 centered in Missouri City, where he has been running for two years. The senior practices twice a day during track season and once a day out of season. During the off season months of May through November, Corder focuses on endurance and speed by typically running on the Bellaire track or occasionally sprinting up hills, often in the company of other Bellaire teammates.
“John doesn’t get tired,” junior and Bellaire track and field runner Aidan Hu said.
Hu has been running for the Wings for four years and recommended the club to Corder.
“You get more interactions with coaches one-on-one than you do at school,” Hu said. “You just learn a lot more. He’s a hard worker, [and] he wins every rep because he tries really hard. When we’re on relays together, he inspires me to do better.”
Briana Jones, Bellaire assistant boys track coach, agreed John is resilient, smart and comes with the mentality to work hard every day.
“Nothing on this earth can hold John Corder back from doing his rep at 120%,” Jones said. “He's a kid that you have to coach differently, because you don't have to be on him as much or change a workout for him. We can be like, ‘We will go swimming today.’ And John's like, ‘Okay, I'm gonna try to do 30 laps before we leave out of here, Coach.’ He's just a different athlete that I have not seen in a while.”
When practicing alone, Corder prefers to train in his hilly hometown of Onalaska, Texas.
“I grew up in Onalaska, and I still have a house there,” Corder said. “There’s hills everywhere, so that's kind of my ideal place to go for longer style runs because the city's not that pretty.”
Onalaska has three traffic lights and “a lot of cows.” But Corder prefers the small town over the stress and commotion of the city.
“I prefer to stay up there as much as possible, just because it's really consistent, [and] it's really quiet,” Corder said.
Corder doesn’t love running; he loves racing.
“I love the competition,” Corder said. “I love the fact that at higher levels, it’s just trying to push the human limit of what’s possible to do.”
When Corder started running, he didn’t know how hard he needed to push his body in order to be successful. He used to just take off and run without being sure of what he was doing.
“Now that I’ve understood my body and how hard I physically have to push it, I know [my] really fine balance,” Corder said. “I've passed out [at] many meets and when I finish the race, my body's kind of on the edge of about how fast it's [physically] able to go and how long it's able to go.”
Unlike sports Corder has played such as football and baseball, where he finds the game enjoyable, the motivation Corder finds in running is persistence in slowly improving.
“Just trying to shave off seconds off the times is just a really exciting deal, because I’ve won races by less than a 10th of a second, and I’ve lost races by less than 10th of a second,” Corder said. “Just to slowly see the time go down by consistent work, I think that’s what’s really enjoyable about the sport.”
Corder’s consistency in the sport led him to a bigger stage: the Junior Olympics.
Each year, two Junior Olympics are held. One hosted by USA Track and Field and one by the AAU. To compete in either of these meets, runners must make top eight in the final rounds of a regional or championship meet, which is preceded by placing top 12 in preliminary rounds.
The 2023 AAU Junior Olympics qualifying meet was held in Jacksonville, Florida, and the USA Track and Field qualifying meet took place at HISD’s Barnett stadium. In 2023, the USA Track and Field junior olympics were held at the University of Texas A&M E.B. Cushing Stadium, while AAU’s were held in North Carolina.
June of 2023, in the midst of Houston summers, Corder set foot into Barnett, ready to run the 800 M race at the USA Track and Field regional championships. No qualifying cuts necessary, no preliminary rounds, just finals.
Going into the meet, Corder had run some decent times and wasn’t heavily recruited, so regional championships was an opportunity to go somewhere.
“I was just gonna go out there and see if I could place,” Corder said. “This was my first real track meet because HISD [athletics] is kind of like a little shield from the rest of the world. This was my first meet that was like, ‘Okay, this is a big deal.’”
Corder finished his race in third place with a time of 1:58, qualifying for the 800 M race at the USA Track and field Junior Olympics in July.
One week after qualifying for the USA Track and Field Junior Olympics, Corder traveled to Jacksonville, Florida in early July to compete in the AAU national championships, the qualifying meet for the AAU Junior Olympics.
Corder said the track club travels on a budget, so his path from Houston, Texas to Jacksonville, Florida took him through Oklahoma and Maryland before he entered the state of Florida.
These three flights accumulated into roughly seven hours of air time, along with two to three hours of layovers.
“The day before the meet is almost as important as the day of,” Corder said. “[I] need stretching and hydration, and being in a plane is exhausting.”
Arriving the day of the championship meet where 12 hours prior, Corder was at 35,000 feet in the air was a “really tedious thing,” Corder said.
“I felt fine, but it was a lot of tightness,” Corder said. “I just didn’t quite feel right.”
In the preliminary round of the meet, Corder was able to snag the last possible qualifying spot for finals: 12th place.
“The national championship [is a] really competitive place,” Corder said. “Larger meets like those are always super fun, [and] there’s usually going to be a few thousand athletes. To make it into finals at national meets, it’s usually the best runners in the nation.”
Corder remembers sitting outside the fence watching the heats before him, praying, ‘please go slow.’ Three days later, Corder lined up on the outer side of lane nine to compete in the final heat of the championships.
Twelve 17 and 18-year-old boys lined up in a nine-lane track. The placement of the runners in the preliminary rounds determined their starting location on the track: the fastest runner on the inside half of lane one, second fastest outside half of lane one, and so forth. Corder was seated last, so with two to a lane, he was placed at the farthest possible location.
“It was interesting looking ahead at the curb and thinking, ‘Wow that's a really long way,’” Corder said.
Corder finished the first lap in third place, faster than intended. Being surrounded by 18-year-old boys, some of the fastest in the nation with five-star recruits, motivated Corder to see how fast he could keep up.
Halfway through the second lap, he collided spikes with another runner. Pure metal against metal. The force of clicking into each other caused him to fall forward. His legs were tired, but he caught himself. Corder fell back to 11th place, but as the 12th runner caught up, he took off in a “Hail Mary” attempt.
“I didn’t come all this way, I didn’t fly all the way to Florida just to end up almost last,” Corder said. “I flew down three people down to 9th, and at the 100-meter mark, I was able to pass the last person. Get in eighth place and bring it home.”
The top eight finalists in the AAU national championship meet are declared “All-American athletes.”
“It’s a really big thing and for me that was a really big day,” Corder said. “It’s a huge achievement for any sports athlete, even football, basketball, baseball; being an all-American, you are considered one of the best athletes in America.”
“I am very proud of him,” Jones said. “That's an amazing thing to accomplish as a teenager, as a high schooler, and I'm hoping that those things will lead to him having a great college career. You [can] tell he enjoys it, and I feel like those things have made him a great leader for our team as well.”
Corder left the Florida stadium with a title and a medal, and gained some recruitment along the way. Corder has offers from the U.S. Navy, Texas A&M and Emory Riddle Aviation school. Scholarships and “walk-on” offers are all options Corder is considering, but he is currently leaning towards Emory University for his passion in aviation, where he can cut down the shortage of pilots and spend his career flying the world.
After qualifying for both the AAU Junior Olympics and the USA Track and Field Junior Olympics, Corder decided to compete in the USA Track and Field junior olympics at Texas A&M, held the last week of July at Cushings stadium.
The 2,200 seats of Cushing stadium sold out. The line for the runners to enter the stadium extended half a mile from the stadium entrance. ESPN cameras and crew among other local and national broadcast channels lined the perimeters of the track.
As the athletes walked closer to the stadium, the intensity rose, the music started to play, the scoreboard went off, the announcers began, and TV cameras everywhere took it all in.
“You're slowly getting closer and closer and closer,” Corder said. “You're wondering, did I stretch enough? Should I be stretching right now? Can I stretch right now?”
Before entering the stadium, the runners are kept in a closed, crowded tent. Ushers lead the runners into the stadium, the lights flash on, and the feeling of thousands of people watching surrounds the runners as the announcer declares the Men’s 800 M Track and Field race.
Corder had three minutes to stretch on the track and line up in his lane before the gun went off, and everything went silent.
“It just happens so fast,” Corder said. “I don't think my mind really registered what was happening, that I'm lining up in front of people from all over the place to race, because it was just so rapid. After the gun goes off you don't really hear anything. It's just full on trying to survive this, [to] try to place high.”
Corder arrived at the Junior Olympics "not quite ready" for the fact that it was no longer just Houston, or just Texas. It was every single one of the best runners of all 50 states in one building. "Let's go racing,” he said.
In the first lap, Corder took off fast, reaching the 400 M marker at 53 seconds. Corder held a first place lead at 200 M, kept the lead until 400 M, but ran out of gas and started falling back.
“I am a larger runner,” Corder said. “I do not like being close to people. So normally I go really fast at the start, just to break out of all that. Just get ahead, avoid all of the chaos of the merge.”
Runners are required to stay in their designated lanes the first 100 meters of the race. After this, all runners merge into lane one: 12 people with nails on their feet, coming together at full speed.
“I remember I did not pace well,” Corder said. “I took off really fast [and] I came through at the 400 at a way faster time than intended.”
After crossing the finish line, the pain sets in.
“It hurts a lot just because the 800 it's considered the hardest event in Track and Field,” Corder said. “You know your legs are gonna give out, the ringing in [my ears] starts and my head gets super light.”
Corder didn’t place in the top 12, and therefore could not race in the finals of the 800 M.
“If you're not on the podium, it's like, ‘Okay, you've had your experience. See you later,’” Corder said.
The senior drove into College Station alone before the meet and parked his car at the closest Trader Joes’ parking lot.
When Corder travels alone, he carries his faith on his shoulder: arm bands with bible verses, and in his heart, as motivation.
“To have the faith and be able to have someone to talk to, to be with you, something to look out to and [think], ‘Okay, I'm covered. Someone is with me. I'm not alone,’ it's definitely helped me feel a lot more comfortable doing races,” Corder said.
After finishing his race, he walked back to Trader Joe’s and drove home.
“It was hard for me to register what I just did, and the fact that it was the top, like, one-ish percent of [runners],” Corder said. “And you just got to do that [race] in front of people from the entire nation.”
“Having gone [to JO’s] is a bittersweet moment because I hate losing,” Corder said. “I made it, but I don't have anything to show for it. [Instead], AAUs means more because it was a huge successful moment to go somewhere that I wasn't really expected to perform. I'm here to take a shot at a huge title that would be unlikely to get, and through some miracle, last place in qualifying was able to come out, beat four people who were ranked way higher than me, and eventually come home and get the [All-American] title.”
“JOs, I've done it, but I'm ready to run it back again.”
