I am a college athlete. It’s great to be able to compete and represent your school while getting an education. It’s also neat that there are some pretty awesome perks such as early registration and traveling for competitions. However, as the old saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch - everything comes at a price, and college athletics exacts a steep one. Some of that price is obvious in the time commitments and social sacrifices that athletes have to make to stay at the top of their game, but there is one realm of costs that is never brought up, one that is almost invisible, but is probably the steepest of all: an athlete's mental health.

I’ve been running competitively for over seven years now, and with some effort I could recount what my best races were like. But I can tell you with perfect clarity every detail of my worst races as if they were yesterday.

There is a hidden Faustian bargain you make as an athlete, in exchange for greatness you give your sport: incredible power to shape how you think and feel about yourself. All it takes is one practice, one workout, one session to make or break your day. You could be be having the best day of your life, then suddenly one bad practice and it’s all horrible. Or, vice versa: a terrible day suddenly becomes a whole lot brighter after one good workout. And that’s just practices let alone competitions.

If a practice can make or break your day, competitions can make or break your whole season. A great race can make you feel invincible, like everything is going to go your way and you are on top of the world. A bad one smacks you down and crushes you up inside, making you feel like a complete and utter failure, even if it wasn’t your fault. Then they linger in your mind long after the season ends haunting you. That is just on the individual level - on the team level it is much more pronounced. There are few words to describe the bus ride home after a bad meet - everyone silent, eyes cast down and headphones on, trying to make themselves as small as possible and block out the world as the air hangs thick with disappointment.

Athletics don't just influence how you feel at any given moment. Rather, your success as as athlete shapes how you think about yourself and your worth as a person. When things are going smoothly, everything is great. You are an accomplished, valuable, contributing member of the team - you have a purpose, you're striving towards a larger goal, and it feels wonderful. You feel that you're worth something, and you wholeheartedly believe it. When things start to get rough, that sense of self-worth goes out the window, and the self-flagellation starts.

You think of yourself as a failure and a disappointment wasting the time of teachers, parents, coaches, teammates, and everyone who ever believed in you. It’s a vicious cycle and it can take down even the toughest athlete. And that’s without the specter of an injury hanging over you. Once you get an injury that lasts more than a week or so it starts to gnaw at you. You begin to feel isolated as you are cut off from your team, stuck doing recovery while they train. There is also a feeling of uselessness that sets in once you realize you are unable to contribute to the team, a feeling that is only compounded when an important competition is coming up and you know you are one of the best players.

Feelings of self-worth are not the only mental health cost that athletics bears. Stress, the age-old foe of college students, is given new life by athletics. I’m sure many of you are familiar with all the stress factors that come along with college: stress related to class, exams, group projects, presentations and the like.

Athletics adds a whole new dimension to all of this. There is stress about practice and workouts ("am I going to do well?” “I messed up, I hope Coach didn't see that"), there is stress about classes (“I have a big test coming up but we have an away game"), there is stress about injuries ("what's wrong with me? Is my season over?"), and then there's stress about competitions ("this is it, we can’t screw this up. It’s all on the line now.”)

Stress about competitions is the worst of them by far with the possible exception of injuries. As I’ve mentioned previously, competitions have a lot of power over athletes and we are all aware of it. I can’t tell you how many nights of sleep I’ve lost because of anxiety about an upcoming race nor how many hours I’ve fretted over every single detail. The worst, though, is those few moments before a race starts when you are on the line waiting to begin. I hate that moment most of all. I’ve had teammates confess to me that they almost start crying because of the anxiety of those few moments.

Perhaps the darkest of all the costs that athletics bring is the risk of obsession. To be a college athlete, particularly at a competitive school, is a lot of pressure. Through incredible dedication and hard work, you become one of the best in your sport, but as cause and consequence of this dedication, you become very attached to your sport. There is a fine line between dedication and commitment in athletics, and all it takes is the right force, internal or external, to push you over the edge.

Considering the power that athletics holds over athletes' well-being and the capacity for sacrifice that athletes possess, there are some truly terrifying extremes this opens up. We have all heard some of the stories of the lengths athletes will go to to try and win - from starving themselves to make their weight requirements or using illegal substances to get a slight edge. I’ve seen many of them first hand. I’ve seen teammates starve themselves, run on injures they should have been resting on, over train by doing secret millage, run their bodies into the ground, and shred their minds by pushing through it despite the pain.

Mental health is a taboo subject in athletics, as athletes are generally reluctant to admit their weaknesses and confront pain. This is not healthy for us or for society, and it’s only by talking about it that it will possibly get better. We need to make ourselves a part of the broader conversations of the sports-related mental health on college campuses so that our voices are heard and issues are addressed.