We received the email the same week we met and received the newest member of our family in China.

Our team was traversing this country we loved and falling in love with the sweet and spicy 3-year-old superhero who orphanage workers had just told us may never walk, and back at home, enthusiastic middle school coaches were preparing for upcoming seasons for teenagers they would soon teach to run.

Our new middle schooler who received 50 percent of his genes from a woman who couldn’t even pass her middle school mile had thus far not shown a lot of promise in the realm of athletics.

He’d tried soccer. (He essentially signed up for the snacks.)

He’d tried football. (After getting a weight waiver because he was legally still small enough he had to sit in a car seat on the way to and from practice, he decided that padding up and facing large boys twice his size was maybe not his athletic gifting and, following the post-season party, told us he would “prefer not to die.”)

He’d even tried some back-to-back seasons of rec basketball (where, during his last game of his last season, his teammates and even opponents tried to pause the game long enough to give this uncoordinated boy the chance to shoot a basket … that he, sweet thing, for the life of him, just could not make).

Ball sports, he decided, were just not his thing.

But putting one leg in front of the other, he thought, could be.

This boy who loved our Saturday family runs had participated in races before. He’d entered local 5Ks and 10Ks, and he’d even won a few in his age group — mostly because, let’s be honest, at 8, 9 and 10, he was one of the only ones IN his age group at the time. (No third place finisher means the competition ain’t exactly cutting.)

So, three days after stepping off the plane that brought his youngest brother home from China, Superhero 1 started 6th grade, and with it, a new club called cross country.