Up until the sixth grade, all I had ever played was soccer and I had played that for a very long time, since I was 4 to be exact. Going into middle school, I tried out for the soccer team and didn’t make it, so I went the whole year just relaxing, going home and playing video games. When spring came around my mom somewhat forced me to try out for the track team; she said that if I tried out she would stop nagging me about it.
Tryouts came and I was really nervous because I didn’t really know anyone trying out for the team and I felt really alone. But I was still there and eventually got to the part where we were going to start running. They gave me two choices, I could either be a sprinter or a distance runner. Me, being the lazy person I still am, opted for the shortness and glory that is usually associated with sprinting. I truly do not know how I made the team but I did and I went through my first year of Track and Field.
The seventh grade is where it started to get real for me, I was racing with the fastest sprinter on the team, Sheldon Harris, in the seeded 400 meter dash, not the exhibition where they just threw in people who didn’t have a spot. I felt like hot stuff and when winter came in my eighth grade year, I went and ran indoor with the high school. I got a stress fracture, so I was only able to run the 500 meter dash in the beginning of the season and in the very end. I dropped 5 seconds and was only 3 seconds off of qualifying for the district meet.
Once I was a freshman, I started trying different things. I ran the 3200 meter twice, the 500 meter almost every meet and I even tried pole vaulting. I actually made it to the district meet in indoor and outdoor for pole vaulting. What changed my running future forever was when my coach forgot to enter me into our big invitational that we host every year. I asked him and he said “oh, well what do you want to run?” I responded by saying I wanted to run the 3200 meter, as a joke, he told me no and for some reason I told him I wanted to do the 800 meter run, a distance race. I ran the 800 meter and beat a lot of the distance runners on the team already and after that year was over I started doing cross country.
That season I worked my butt off to prove that I could stay with the faster guys. The result of me working my butt off was that I got to go to States as an alternate in cross country, a sport that I hate and if you ask me why I do it I would say “I really don’t know, I think I’m crazy.” Even after realizing that I was a distance runner, it still took me a while to find my event--my senior year is the year I finally felt it come together.
That’s the reason I still run, because I finally felt it come together and I don’t want it to end and that makes me a runner still. There are so many different answers to the question, “Why are you a runner?” I could say I’m crazy, that my mom kinda forced me into it, I could even say that I like it, my favorite answer is that my coach forgot to put me into a meet. If he hadn’t have forgotten, I might’ve stayed a sprinter and if I was a sprinter I would most certainly not still be running right now. So thank goodness my coach was forgetful.
