I was cycling and noticed a person, about a quarter of a kilometer in front of me. I could tell he was cycling a little slower than me and _______ to try to catch up with him. I had about a kilometer to go on the road _______ turning off.

So I _______ cycling faster and faster and every _______, I was gaining on him just a little bit. After just a few minutes I was only about 100 yards _______ him, so I really picked up the pace and _______ myself. You would have _______ I was cycling in the last section of the London Olympic triathlon.

_______ I caught up with him and passed by him. On the inside I felt so _______. I beat him, of course, but he didn't even know we were ________.

After I passed him, I ________ that I had been so focused on competing against him that I had ________ my turn. I had gone nearly six blocks past it and had to turn around and go all the way back.

Isn't that what happens in life when we ________ competing with co­workers, neighbors, and friends, trying to ________ that we are more successful or more important? We spend our time and ________ chasing after them and we miss out on our own ________ to our future.

The ________ of unhealthy competition is that it's a never­ending ________. And there will always be somebody ahead of you, someone with a ________ job, more money and more education, etc.

Therefore, just take what life has given you, your height, weight and personality. Stay focused and live a peaceful life. There's no ________ in life. Run your own race and wish others well!

I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a goods yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I can dimly remember the _________ of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a(n) _________ can do strange things to people.

It ________ to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn't been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, _________. I don't mean that I would prefer to _______ without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had ________.

Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of _________ to reality. In ________ of the fact they are never easy, I had my parents and teachers to help. The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. If I hadn't been able to do that, I would have ________ and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say belief in myself I am not talking about _________ the kind of self confidence that helps me down an ________staircase alone. That is part of it. But I mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite __________, a real, positive person; that there is a special place where I can make myself _______.

It took me years to discover and _________ this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was laughing at me and I was hurt. “I can't use this.” I said. “Take it with you，” he urged me, “and roll it around.” The words ________ in my head. “Roll it around！” By rolling the ball I could hear where it _______. This gave me an idea how to achieve a goal I had thought ________: playing baseball.   At Philadelphia’s Overbrook School for the Blind I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it ground ball.

All my life I have set ahead of me a series of goals and then tried to achieve them, one at a time. I had to learn my _________. It was no good crying for something that I knew at the start was wildly out of ________ because that only __________ the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway but on the average I made progress.

A man was exploring some caves by the seashore. In one cave he _________ a bag of hardened clay balls. It seemed that someone had _________ some clay and baked the balls in the sun. They didn’t look like _________ things, but they interested him, so he took the bag out of the cave with him.

As he walked along the beach he _________ the clay balls one at a time out into the ocean as far as he could. He thought _________ about it until he dropped one of the balls and it cracked open on a rock. Inside was a beautiful, precious stone. _________, the man started breaking open the remaining clay balls. Each contained a similar treasure. He found thousands of dollars’ worth of jewels in the 20 or so clay balls he had _________, and then it struck him: Instead of thousands of dollars in treasure, he could have had tens of thousands, with the 50 or 60 clay balls with their _________ treasures which were now in the ocean. He just _________ the chance.

Sometimes it’s like that with __________. When we look at a person, we usually only see “the outside clay shell”. It isn’t always beautiful or shining, so we __________ the person; we see him as less important than someone more beautiful or more __________. But we haven’t taken the time to look for the __________ inside that person. If we spend the time getting to know that person, the clay will __________ and the brilliant jewel will shine. We are __________ made, not only with our physical bodies, but also with our spiritual selves, which are sometimes hidden from others by the “earthen shell”.