To all those former distance runners:
People have called you crazy for running the hundreds of miles you have. You have voluntarily put your body through torture by doing the sport that other sports consider to be punishment. Your sport went year round, with a total of only four weeks off all year, two weeks after cross country and two weeks after track, then right back into it to prepare for the next season. You learned how to build your running plan, including long runs, tempos, workouts, and easy days, and how to fit these plans to your body and the season you wanted to have. You've dealt with injuries, iron deficiencies, and mental walls you had to break down. And yet these experiences created the person you are today. They taught you so many things about yourself, who you want to be, and how to be that person.
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The sport gave you the best friends you could ever ask for, people who were truly a second family, and who last so much longer than the sport itself. As with any team, when you are with the same people every day for hours of practices, meets, and team bonding, you get to know them better than you'd ever expect. But even more so with cross country and even track. With distance running, you are running 6-11 miles a day with the same ten girls (even though the higher the mileage, the smaller the group seemed to get) and you talk about anything and everything, but the conversation never seemed to lack. Not to mention how you all shared the same goals and wanted to achieve them as a team more than anything. While personal bests were always beyond important, they weren't always realistic. But working with your team to place higher in races than the year before, make it to districts, then regionals, then finally state, together, as one, was what really mattered. Even if you weren't the ones on the team actually running the race, you still all wanted and worked for the same thing.
The things that being a distance runner taught me will stick with me forever. I learned how to persevere through anything to reach my goals and to legitimately work my butt off. Nothing in life comes easy, you sometimes have to work until you're exhausted but in the end it always pays off. I learned to put in the extra work during the off season, whether it was a few extra miles a week or tempos that sometimes kicked my butt, and it always ended up benefiting me. I learned that you may not like everyone person you come across or have to be around, but it is absolutely possible to work with them to achieve mutual goals. I learned that you may not achieve every goal, and it is okay.
I will be the first to admit that my mentality during cross country and track were not always the best. I would get down on myself for not having a fast enough time or not getting better each season. By the end of my four years I realized that those were not everything and while it would've been great to always run super fast times, it was not realistic. I watched one of my best friends on the team who was two years younger than me, get down on herself, just like I had. I realized that no one should have that mentality, whether in cross country, school, or anything, and I realized that I had not set the example for her that I should've.
I was a leader on that team, and the younger girls looked up to us upperclassmen. I learned to look at things with a positive mentality, which I have been able to take with me into college. Telling yourself that you're never fast enough, smart enough, or good enough, won't get you anywhere. It always ended up discouraging me to the point where I eventually believed I truly wasn't fast enough or good enough, for myself or my teammates. Being a distance runner taught me how to push myself as hard as I could and then be okay with the outcome. It taught me to be happy with who I am and what I achieve, but to also never give up on my dreams or myself.
