Superstar jockey Shane Sellers escaped an abusive upbringing to reach the upper echelons of horse racing, finding community in his fellow athletes and meeting his soul mate and future wife in the process. But the dark side of the sport for Sellers included wrestling with unresolved anger issues and an eating disorder linked to the industry’s weight requirements, which he eventually overcame. Here's an excerpt from his autobiography, “Freedom’s Rein.”

Chapter 1
Most kids run through their houses for fun. I used to run through my house to get away from the cockroaches.

My childhood home was the kind of place that you would see on a TV show that makes fun of rednecks. The house itself was tiny; so small that there was barely room to sleep. It consisted of a decent sized living room that led to a long kitchen. To the left of the kitchen was my parents’ room. Through their room was the bedroom that I shared with my three siblings. Three boys and a girl, all living in one room.

It’s not like it was a big room, either. My younger brother Ryan and I shared a bed, my older brother Keith had his own bed, and my little sister Kristy had her own bed. Cramming three beds into that tiny room didn’t help things any. And with a 12 year age difference from my oldest brother Keith to my youngest sister Kristy, that situation was just plain weird as were the rest of our lives.

The second we would come from our room and turn the lights on, little bitty roaches would scatter around and run all over the house. They mostly stayed in the kitchen, creeping out of the cabinets, where they hoped to find a bit of food. The funny thing was that there really wasn’t any food in my kitchen or anywhere else in my house for that matter.

My constantly rumbling stomach could testify to that fact.

To be fair, it’s not that I was starving; I was just hungry for something different. All of us were. But even though we couldn’t afford gourmet meals and we couldn’t dine out at the best restaurants, my mother Glenda never let us go hungry. She was a great woman and she always took great care of us kids. We all respected her for that and we still do. She’s the glue that’s kept our family together and we love her for all she did.

My mom always had something for us to eat, even if it wasn’t all that good. We spent many nights eating my not-so-favorite meal, rice and eggs. And that dish is exactly what it sounds like: white rice covered by two or three eggs from our chicken coop.

When I used to collect eggs from our chickens, sometimes I dreamed of bringing a chicken in the house and preparing the chicken to eat, instead. I imagined those breasts, wings, and thighs, just waiting for us to devour them. Then I imagined how hungry we would be if we chose one nice meal over years of eggs, and sat down to eat my eggs and rice.

Of course, we loved meat and we ate it whenever we could. Sometimes we just didn’t have a very practical way of getting that meat.

Some nights my dad would go poaching, also known as outlawing, to get us whatever kind of meat he could find. Since it was illegal to poach in Louisiana, the last thing he wanted was for the game wardens to hear his gunshots. He had more than enough problems with our state’s authorities as it was and there was no need to make matters any worse. So my dad’s philosophy was to shoot something, grab it, stick it in the car, and get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.

He would creep around the local waterways robbing other people’s crab traps, and sometimes he went poaching for geese. It wasn’t easy for him to secure a whole family’s worth of food illegally, but fortunately, being sneaky was the one thing my dad was really good at.

And in one of the few things we did together as a family, my father frequently brought along some of us kids for the illegal ride.

When you outlaw for food, you learn that animals know almost as much about securing meals as people do. For instance, rabbits head onto quiet roads to feed when it rains outside. And where the rabbits went, our hungry stomachs were sure to follow.

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