This past year, I joined the cross country team at school. I had never done anything like it before, but I'd always wanted to give it a try. So for my last year of high school I decided to give it a shot.


To give you some brief background information, I'm going to start off now by saying that when I started high school, I developed an eating disorder. I became severely underweight and weak, and before I finally got treatment, I used to exercise obsessively. After I started receiving treatment, I stopped exercising. I had to be very careful about how much working out I did, since I had a tendency to overdo it. This was the first year I felt sure enough about myself to start exercising again.

            I remember my first practice. We only had to run two miles, but everyone else ran so much faster than me. When everyone around you is running fast, you're naturally going to try and match their pace. I tried, but it was exhausting. And every practice after that was just as exhausting, if not more. We ran Monday through Wednesday after school, then Thursdays and Fridays in the mornings at six o'clock. I have never gotten up that early before in my life.

            Let me tell you something about running. You start off and you feel great. You're flying forward like a bullet. But it gets harder very quickly. You run out of breath and your legs start to feel like they're made of lead. Every step forward sucks more and more energy out of your body like a Hummer cruising down the interstate on a quarter tank of gas. It hurts to breathe, hurts to move, hurts to even hold yourself up on two legs. And every inch of your body is screaming at your brain to stop. But you don't stop. You can't stop. I remember I couldn't even think about how much longer I had left to run because it made it even harder. You don't think; you just go. And when you finally finish, you feel so exhausted that you don't think you can stand up anymore.

It didn't take long before all my friends on the team decided they couldn't hack it and quit, which Coach Pool said happens every year (can you blame them?). After that, it was just me all alone with a bunch of random little girls who I've never seen before, but apparently go to my school. I hate being in situations where I don't know anybody and I have no friends. That hadn't happened to me since like, middle school.
            In addition to having no one to talk to, I also became the slowest person on the whole freaking team. I wasn't at first, but everyone else got faster and I just kind of stagnated. I knew it was going to be that way from the get-go since my body just isn't built for speed, athleticism, or even physical activity at all. Being the only slow person made it worse. In the beginning, I had friends, and we all sucked together. Sucking all by yourself is just pathetic.


So I was working my butt off every day and not getting any better. And to top it all off, I had no friends to suffer with me. Normally I would have just quit after the second or third week without even hesitating, but something was holding me back. I kept reminding myself that I wasn't doing this for anyone else. I wasn't there to impress anyone, or to make friends with the little freshman girls instagramming on their iPhone 5's. I was doing it for me, and only me. That's what kept me from quitting.

On the day of our first meet, I was terrified. Normally I have a pretty nonchalant attitude about everything, but seeing all these intense athlete people getting all pumped up made me nervous. I remember asking one girl if we were actually supposed to go fast and she was like, "Well, that's kind of the idea. It's a race." And that's when I really started to panic. I couldn't go fast, and I definitely couldn't win anything, either. The only reason I was on the team was to give myself something to do besides sitting at home eating Pop-tarts.

That day, I was fully expecting to die and be airlifted off the course. The meet was at City Park, but it was in this weird area that looked like an African savana. There were these trees with skinny branches and thick canopies of foliage and the ground was all sand and tall grass. Also, it was two hundred degrees outside and there wasn't a cloud in the sky (runners don't like sunny days, by the way. Imagine doing laps in an oven. It's not exactly ideal). The course was only two miles, but the fact that it was blazing hot and I was nervous made it more difficult than usual. Coach Pool said nerves are what make you go faster and make the race exciting. I didn't know what he was talking about. For me, nerves just made the race worse. So the whole time I was running I imagined I was in The Lion King, which distracted me a little.
           
Around the last half mile, I started to feel really, really exhausted. Everybody else had already finished the race because they didn't have twinkies for bones like me. Actually, there was this one girl from the other team who was even slower than I was, so that was good I guess.

Once I neared the finish line, my teammates found me and started running with me and cheering me on and stuff, which was totally unexpected. I was flattered, though, because I totally thought they would have forgotten about me. I realized that when you're sore and exhausted, it helps a lot to have people around you cheering you on and telling you you're not going to die, you know?

Remember that girl I mentioned? The poor soul who was slower than me? Well, she had been taking short cuts the whole way, and she showed up right before the finish line. But I was like, "Um, I don't think so." And even though my body was so tired at this point that it could literally do nothing but stumble clumsily forward, I stumbled forward as fast as I could because there was no way I was going to let that lazy cheat beat me. And guess what? She didn't.

So that was my first meet ever. There were a lot more after that, and they were all basically the same except that the courses were now three miles. I ran the most painful three miles of my life and my teammates cheered me on. Then I came in dead last or close to it and spent the rest of the day cheering other teammates who ran in different divisions. I started to get really frustrated because out of all the forty-something girls on our team, I was the only one who hadn't gotten any better.

One day in October we had to run a meet at St. Thomas Aquinas. There were a ton of schools there with a ton of kids. Among them were these Pentecostal girls from Walker who wore boy's gym shorts and had moms with jean skirts and white tennis shoes. There were also these RUDE girls from Zachary who I wanted to punch in the face but didn't.

I started the race and did horribly as expected. There was only one girl behind me. The track was really confusing and poorly marked, so I got totally lost around the second mile. At one point, I was so tired and far behind that I just stopped running and cried, which shocked me and made me angry because I never cry. I guess I was really stressed or something, I don't know. But I sucked it up and kept going. Eventually, I got so lost that I gave up and left the course. I honestly had no idea what I was still doing in cross country, because it was so obvious I did not belong here.

Coach Pool found me wandering through the parking lot crying, and I asked him what the point was. Why was I still doing cross country if I wasn't getting any better and was just embarrassing myself? He gave me some line about how the fact that I stuck it out showed how determined I am, blah blah blah. He said I was an inspiration to the younger girls on the team because when they see me improving and not giving up, it encourages them to keep trying. I told him that didn't make any sense because I literally hadn't improved at all.

I went home feeling like a failure. I was just relieved he hadn't yelled at me or killed me for dropping out of the race like I had expected him to. I didn't buy what he said at first, but when I thought about it later, it sort of made sense. I did try, and there were a million times when I wanted to quit but didn't. Lots of other people who were struggling quit right at the beginning, but I stuck with it. I had kind of come a long way. Running three miles was a breeze now, and I could sprint pretty fast (long distance running was another story entirely, but whatever). And that one time when I missed a whole week of practice, the other girls had been asking where I was and wondering about me, which I thought was strange since I thought they didn't know me or care. But apparently, they did, I guess.

I ran the rest of the season with a much more positive attitude. I tried my absolute best and even managed to keep up with everyone else! At the end of the season I was given the Coach's Award. I'm definitely glad that I stuck it out. It feels like such a big accomplishment, because I thought I was the kind of person who gave up easily. In the end, I was proud of myself for proving I could push through without quitting. I loved being part of a team that supported and believed in each other. That was something I had never experienced before.

Cross country helped straighten out my life, too. When you have an eating disorder, dieting becomes your life. It takes over your very being and you can't do anything else. So when I entered recovery, and had to quit dieting, I didn't know how to do anything else. I had forgotten how to eat and live like a normal person. I was kind of lost and it made me depressed. Cross country gave me a healthy routine to get into. It showed me how to balance exercise and diet in a natural, non-obsessive way, which was really relieving. The healthy habits I developed gave me structure and helped me pull myself out of the hole that anorexia and depression had trapped me in, the hole I thought I would never get out of.

Now, I'm not going to lie to you. I have school and work and life to take care of, which means that I don't have time to go running every day anymore. But I still use the knowledge I learned from my time on the team. I know how to be active and healthy, and how to stay determined and keep moving despite pain. I remember all those hard practices I went to and all the meets that I finished, and I feel like I can do anything. So the moral of this story is that sometimes you're going to suck at things, and they're going to be really hard. Sometimes, no matter what you do or how hard you try, it will always be a challenge and you'll never reach perfection. But that's okay because perfection is not the point. Hard work always pays off regardless, and you'll be a stronger, wiser person because of it. If you keep that in mind and never, ever, ever, give up, you can pull through pretty much anything.