Race of My Own: An Olympian's Quest
is the coming-of-age memoir of Olympian Ayden Owens-Delerme. With his fearless storytelling, Owens grants the reader first-hand exposure through his journey to self-discovery. Growing up between two distinct cultures, with a black American father and a Puerto Rican mother, he grapples with a torn identity. His lack of belonging contributes to his athletic successes and personal failures, as he feels he is a race of his own-a lost soul. To discover meaning, Owens embarks on a voyage to unearth his ancestors' voices and takes the courageous leap of contributing his own to the great human song.
His narration enables the reader to try on his shoes, as he undergoes pivotal transformations in his thinking and perspective. Whereas most memoirs of athletes and superstars are written retrospectively, post-fame and success, Owens recounts a story in motion. He represents a being in action in a never-ending pursuit of truth and self-discovery of which greatness is an earthly byproduct and never loses sight of the goal: Running his own race.
He dives into the consequences of forced assimilation in a colonial context as told through the lens of his mother's family's immigration from Puerto Rico. His evolving perspective is driven by the understanding of his socialization in a white American backdrop as a doubly colonized Puerto Rican and African American, orphaned from his true motherland and forced to define himself.
Owens walks you through his early struggles with mental health and identity crises before revealing the path he's carved, which happened to lead the world's biggest stage: The Olympic Games. In this book, you will see how a man born "a race of his own" grew to recognize that, in life, we all must run our own race.