When Justin Weegar races, he intentionally wears different colored calf-length socks under his Nike Zoom Matumbo spikes. One of the socks is always purple, the color of domestic violence awareness.

Weegar, a 17-year-old senior from Evans, Georgia, is acutely familiar with the violence that traumatizes millions of women each year in the U.S. Four years ago, his mother, Misty, 41, was murdered by her former fiancé.

Weegar’s parents, Tim and Misty, divorced when he was four, sharing custody of him and his older sister, Bethanny. In 2010, Misty began dating Michael Todd Williams, and they became engaged.

Misty broke off the engagement when Williams became abusive. On August 11, 2010, Williams, under the influence of alcohol, beat and stabbed Misty to death in her townhome. A year and a half later, Williams accepted a plea of felony murder and was sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after serving 30 years.

Tim broke the heart-breaking news to Justin the morning after his mother’s death. He remembers it as the hardest day of his life. “I knew he was at such a vulnerable age,” Tim says about his son, who was 13.

By then, Weegar had begun to dominate middle school cross country and track races, and in the months after the tragedy, Tim kept his son focused. “You’ve got three things to do: keep your grades up, keep your nose clean, and have fun,” he said. “Let me worry about the rest. You have too much to offer. And that’s what your mom would want for you: to shine, to keep running.”

With the encouragement of his father and other family members, Weegar chose the high road, pursuing his passions with relish. “There’s no excuse for one person’s actions to take me down and make my life miserable,” he says. He is grateful for the support of his family, including his paternal grandparents who have lived next door for years. “They hold me up,” he says. “It wasn’t like I was on my own.”

After the tragedy, Weegar continued to excel in running, but he opted for football rather than cross country at the start of his freshman year at Evans High School. Mike Lennox, then the varsity cross country coach, had witnessed Weegar’s talent in middle school and employed a subtle public relations campaign to gain his attention. “I used the influence of a few of the kids, saying, ‘Tell him to come out,’ ” he remembers. It worked. After three weeks, Weegar parted ways with football and joined cross country.

Without any kind of base, Weegar was just another runner in the middle of the pack early in the season. But he improved weekly and finished ninth at the regional championships, missing state as an individual runner by four places.

Realizing that he possessed untapped potential, Weegar attended a track camp after his freshman year at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Under the guidance of head cross country and track coach Bob Braman, he ran twice a day with other campers and learned training principles and race strategy.

By increasing his mileage, which reached 40 miles a week last summer, Weegar has established himself as one of the top cross country runners in Georgia. He is the two-time defending champion at the region meet and set a PR of 15:36.21 in the 5K at the highly competitive Asics Invitational during his sophomore year. At the Class 5A state championships, he was fifth as a sophomore and third as a junior.

Weegar’s track times haven’t reached the scholarship standard at the stronger Division I programs, but he is banking on improving this year. The University of North Carolina at Pembroke, a Division II school, is recruiting him, and Patrick Cunniff, the distance coach at the University of Georgia, has told Lisa Chizmar, the current cross country coach at Evans, that Weegar could walk on.

Weegar’s favorite interval workout is pick-up repetitions at 400m—the second, fifth, and eighth ones in 62 seconds and the others in 65 seconds—with a 90-second recovery between each, reduced to 30 seconds by the end of the season.

Appointed captain by Chizmar this season, Weegar, who has grown to 6 feet, 150 pounds, takes a leadership role during intervals, encouraging teammates through the rough patches. Chizmar has observed his growing maturity over four years. “He is a happy, excitable kid, though he’s lost his mom,” she says. “It hasn’t calloused him or made him cold.”

On August 11, 2014, the fourth anniversary of his mother’s death, Weegar posted on his Instagram account that he was thankful that this tragedy had happened to him rather than his friends. “I believe God chose me because he knows that I would be able to deal with the loss,” he wrote. “I suffer every day because of the loss of my mom. You can’t really be angry that you’re suffering. You have to thank God for making you suffer. You can’t be human unless you suffer.”

Weegar, who maintains a 3.6 GPA, has sought opportunities to move beyond his own grief and be involved in the solution to domestic violence. He is writing his senior paper, called the Capstone Project, on the effects of domestic violence in the community as a whole. He has also volunteered to be one of 36 men—and the only teenager— in “It Takes a Man,” each raising $1,000 as part of a campaign to build a 36-bed residential facility for Safe Homes of Augusta. Its mission is to transform victims of domestic violence into survivors. To raise the money, he helped design a T-shirt, which sells for $20.

After watching the video of NFL star running back Ray Rice punching his then-fiancée unconscious and dragging her out of an elevator in an Atlantic City casino hotel, Weegar was repulsed by the brutality. “It’s disgusting,” he says. “It makes you want to throw up. I think they did the right thing by suspending him indefinitely. He shouldn’t get any special treatment because he is a celebrity.”

Success in the 1,600 and 3,200 on the track has proven more elusive than cross country. Weegar blames it on an inability to focus for four or eight laps and hit his splits. As a result, he dropped down to the 800m his junior year and qualified for the state track meet with a PR of 2:00.29.

“I enjoy running a lot,” he says. “I just know my mom wanted me to carry it out. I’m going to do it in her honor.”

A telephone conversation his mother had with a friend a week before her death is burned in Weegar’s memory. He overheard her saying, “I believe he’ll be a runner when he grows up.”

That’s all the motivation he needs.

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