On Oct. 11, hundreds of runners competed in a cross-country race in Minnesota. Melanie Bailey should have ____1____ the course earlier than she did. Her ____2____ came because she was carrying a ____3____ across the finish line.
As reported by a local newspaper, Bailey was more than two-thirds of the way through her ____4____ when a runner in front of her began crying in pain. She ____5____ to help her fellow runner, Danielle Lenoue. Bailey took her arm to see if she could walk forward with ____6____. She couldn’t. Bailey then ____7____ to let Lenoue climb onto her back and carried her all the way to the finish line, then another 300 feet to where Lenoue could get ____8____ attention.
Once there, Lenoue was ____9____ and later taken to a hospital, where she learned that she had serious injuries in one of her knees. She would have struggled with extreme ____10____ to make it to that aid checkpoint without Bailey’s help.
As for Bailey, she is more ____11____ about why her act is considered a big ____12____. “She was just crying. I couldn’t ____13____ her,” Bailey told the reporter. “I feel like I was just doing the right thing.”
Although the two young women were strangers before the ____14____, they’ve since become friends. Neither won the race, but the ____15____ of human kindness won the day.