Over 2 years later and I’m finally ready to write.
It's been 2 years since I ran my final cross-country race.
Though to me, it feels like it’s been much longer than that.
Because if you ask me, my running career ended years before I stepped over that finish line on October 31, 2022.
But before I get there, let me take you back to the start: first grade.
I went to a small private school through third grade. And I owe my entire cross-country career to it.
That is, because it was the only sport my school had at the time.
Luckily, I loved it like no other.
And I was good. Really good.
I still remember walking into school one day with my first trophy. I carried it around with me all day (And eventually, dropped it and broke part of it off. Immediate tears, but nothing some glue couldn’t fix).
I kept running through elementary school, and collected many awards along the way.
Then came the end of third grade.
My family moved and I now started school at a public school, which meant, more sports and more opportunities. Excited to start playing what I called “real sports,” I quickly forgot about the sport that my heart loved. Come fifth grade, I quit running.
Thankfully, I found my way back.
Seventh grade is when the official cross country team started for my school, so I decided then I would give it another shot. I convinced my friend to run with me and that first year was a blast. I went to a pretty small school, so our team wasn’t all too good, but I would say that was what made it so enjoyable. We were all just there to have a fun time and do the sport we loved (yet complained we hated).
After that, it just kept getting better. Though I couldn’t convince my friend to run with me again after that first year, I met some of my best friends and made the best memories. Looking back, I would do anything to take one more 5 AM bus ride to a cross-country invitational. There’s nothing quite like it.
I was on cloud 9 with my sport those first 3 years… then sophomore year came. After freshman year I had the goal of making it to states at least once in my high school career. Little did I know the troubles the next few years would bring.
Summer after freshman year I was determined to hit this goal. I was used to being a good runner… with a little more effort, how hard could it be?
Boy was I wrong.
I was sick. And I was in denial. I would wake up each morning and try to go out for a run, only to make it a few miles before I was too sick to my stomach to continue. Later, I would try again for an afternoon run, and often make it 5-10 miles… but would end up throwing up with a raging migraine as soon as I stopped. At that point, I would run even longer because I knew as soon as I stopped I would be sick. I ended up losing 10 pounds but refused to stop trying toward my goal.
As the season started back up in August, I tried everything to get myself healthy enough to run. After finally doing a lab test to check my hormones, I started trying a bunch of different concoctions in hopes of fixing the problem. At one point I was eating scoops of nut butter before bed and waking up an hour before my 7 AM practices to drink protein powder and juice, yet still saw no change.
Then school started back up, and things only got worse. By this point, my anxiety was so high that before racing I had to lay on the ground and block everyone out and focus on my breathing. Race days were no longer fun like they used to be, but stress-inducing.
I had to quit before the season ended. Worst feeling ever. I still ran enough races to get my varsity pin, though I did feel a bit undeserving.
As the year went on, I tried to keep running, but my body was only getting sicker. February of my sophomore year, I became bedridden and finally had to throw in the towel on running.
A few months before that, I journaled “At least I can still run.”
I didn’t come back across it until a year later, and that sentence became gut-wrenching to read. Because then, I had lost that too.
And since then I have yet to really get it back.
For the first time since I was 6 years old, a fall went by without a single cross-country invitational.
The hardest part was that so much of my identity was placed in it. I was a runner. That’s who I was.
I didn’t realize how much I had lost that until my senior year of high school, when I started going to a new church and making new friends. One day, after I had said I ran 5 miles (well, a sad excuse for a run), my one friend said, “You should run cross country.”
That killed me. I later looked at my wall of medals and bibs and realized that’s not who I was anymore. Though part of me knew that every day when I woke up and looked at that wall, it all hit me in a different light that day.
That moment really shook me, and it was that very comment that convinced me to give running another shot. I ended up running the last three races of the season my senior year, which I wrote about in my blog “start somewhere (why not here)?” But then, it was over. My high school career done, just like that. And I missed out on over half of it.
Part of me still hasn’t recovered from that.
Since stepping over that last finish line 2 years ago now, I have tried to regain my love for running. It has been a bumpy road navigating what I was once so easily good at, to what I now struggle greatly with.
I have had a love-hate relationship with running since then. I have yet to be able to run at under 8-minute pace again. If I break a 10-minute pace, I am lucky. I still cannot run more than a mile without having to stop and walk, when once I could run 7-10 without ever breaking a stride.
It is a hard journey not only losing your health, but losing the parts of your life that went along with it. Running was mine. And though I am not yet giving up on it, I have had to realize it may not ever be like it used to be… and that’s okay.
Though many runs now end in tears, longing for what I once had, I can’t help but be grateful that I can still try. It may not be the same as it was, but all hope isn’t gone yet. And it may never be the same, but maybe that's okay. Maybe that makes it mean even more.
I have found now after losing my ability to run, I have an appreciation for it like never before. As Mitch Albom writes in his book Tuesdays with Morrie, in the words of his old professor who was dying of ALS, “He nodded toward the window with the sunshine streaming in. ‘You see that? You can go out there, outside, anytime. You can run up and down the block and go crazy. I can't do that. I can't go out. I can't run. I can't be out there without fear of getting sick. But you know what? I appreciate that window more than you do.’”
As I’ve said time and time again, sometimes it takes losing something to realize just how much it really means.
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