Hey everyone! Hope your Easter weekend has been going well.
My little brother Parker, runs cross-country, plays tennis, and runs track for Riverton High School. He wrote this inspirational story I wanted to share.
I had just set a personal record for the one mile when it hit me. I pushed through the next mile of my very first high school 5k, but then I hit that wall. Runners started passing me in a frenzy. I hated that feeling, and it made me run faster. My body couldn’t take it anymore and I threw up. Still, in a desire to not get passed I continued running. I threw up four more times within that next mile, but I never walked. I hurt so badly, but when I reached track to finish the last 300 meters, oh did I find something new.
I’d had runs where I’d been tired and had found a “second wind” but that was never like this. This feeling was something different. All the pains and cramps left my mind, and I ran like I had never run before. I was able to pick up my pace to a near dead sprint and finish so fast! Since that first race of my freshman year I have run a lot faster times on a lot harder courses, but I know that I never would have reached those times had it not been for what I felt during this race.
That feeling I got as I entered the stadium and finished on the track has taken me a long time to recognize. I’ve spent years now recapturing that energy and trying to harness it at the end of difficult workouts and important races. In hindsight I now see that that energy came from my mind. At the end of that race I was literally able to put my mind over matter!
This has been the single-most valuable lesson I have ever learned. Our bodies are physically capable of so much more than we require of them. Countless times now I have reached a point on a run where my lungs are screaming that I can do no more. But ever since that first race I have always been able to say, “I can do more!”
This lesson I learned in a high school cross-country race has helped me so much more than any lesson I have ever learned in school. In fact, the lesson I learned that day has helped me to learn more from school! So many times I have been overwhelmed by the subject matter in a hard class, and I’ve thought, “I can’t learn this; I’m just not as smart as these other kids.” But then I think, “of course I can do this, it may take more work, but I can do so much more than I think I can!”
That lesson right there—I learned it in the third mile of my very first 5K—has shaped almost all I have ever accomplished. I learned so much more there in that school-sponsored race than I have ever learned in a school classroom. What I learned is that I am so much stronger than I think I am! I learned that I can accomplish anything I set my mind to.
This is a submission for the 2012-2013 graduation scholarship sponsored by Honors Graduation.
This is a submission for the 2012-2013 graduation scholarship sponsored by Honors Graduation.
