I came across a post the other day. It was of someone questioning whether or not sports like cheerleading, dance, track, and cross country were sports. I found it interesting from reading the comments how many people felt like track and cross country were not sports. It really surprised me. Everyone hates to run, yet they love to pretend it is easy.

I have played a lot of sports throughout my life and I like to consider myself a fairly athletic person. I played volleyball up until my freshman year of high school, on a team with very athletic girls. I played softball up until my sophomore year, then played basketball and soccer all the way through high school. I played for a school that was in the "big school" category in the state of Missouri, so we played against a lot of tough teams.

I ran cross country my sophomore year. I was going to play volleyball, but after I ran the mile during volleyball tryouts pretty quickly, the cross country coaches persuaded me to run. At the time, I did not know what I was getting myself into. Being a soccer and basketball player who normally finished conditioning first, I thought that cross country would be easy, but I was completely wrong.

The practices were long and tough. Have you ever heard of repeats? It's where you run a certain route and time yourself. You got a good time? Good, now you have to beat that time when you run it again about a minute later. You do this about six times. By the sixth time, you are literally dead. You hate yourself. Like, literally, you question why you ever thought running was a good idea. However, when you are finally done, you have such a great feeling in your heart.

The next type of practice that we had was distance practices. This is where we would run miles at a time. You always had a "pack" that you'd typically want to keep up with, and if you were on varsity, you could not stop or even slow down. If you did slow down, you'd never catch back up.

Then there were the meets. I usually did not get nervous before soccer, basketball, volleyball, or softball games. I was pretty confident, but let me tell you one thing, there is nothing more intimidating than standing at the line at the beginning of a cross-country race waiting for the gun to go off. Your heart literally falls into your butt. As soon as the gun sounds, everyone takes off sprinting. You've been running for awhile and your lungs start to burn and you're thinking that you should be getting close...then you see the one-mile sign and remember that you still have 2.1 miles left to go. You feel like you can't do it. You hit your "I hate this so much I'm going to stop" at about two miles, and you contemplate quitting cross country altogether. When you have about a half mile left one of either two things happens, you get a whole bunch of energy and your legs go numb or you pee your pants. And yes, peeing your pants is a normal thing in cross country. Also, sometimes after you finish a race you can feel amazing, but other times you can still feel as if you are dying even after you are done running.

You burn off a lot of calories, so it is extremely important to carb up. Ice baths are very important. Your muscles will be pushed to the fullest limit and your mind has to be mentally strong. Seriously, you have to be mentally tough. You can't stop like in basketball and soccer. You don't have a ball to distract you. It's not like running with headphones on. You literally have no distractions to take your mind off of the pain. While you're running all you think about is how bad you're hurting, how much you want to quit, how tired you are, but for some reason, you keep going.

When I first started running cross country, I had no idea how hard it would be on my body. I walked away with so many injuries. I was probably down to about 109 pounds when I normally weigh 138. I was skin and bones even though I was eating like a pig. I was in pain all the time. I would cramp up if I wasn't constantly drinking water. You also have to figure out how to pace yourself. If you go too fast you'll die down mid-race. If you go to slow you won't medal. My mentality grew a lot stronger, though. Seriously, to run cross country you have to be mentally tough. No matter what when you're running you don't stop. You keep going, because in a crazy cross country runner's mind all that matters is that you finish. It made me a stronger person, mentally and physically, way more than soccer and basketball ever would. So yes, cross country is a sport and it's a damn difficult one.