Student profile
The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
With less than half a mile to go in the race, the view became blurrier. I crashed to the ground. As soon as I woke up, I tried getting back into the race, but I couldn't move. The race had been long over. I felt weak and my heart would not stop pounding. A paramedic was trying to feed me electrolytes, but I was so lost that I put my hands up as if I was under arrest. For the following week, my words were slurred. It was hard to follow in class. I struggled to voice my opinions in the debate tournament the same weekend.
Despite this, I felt I had to get right back into training. Every day, I looked forward to going on my daily run. It was a time where I could forget all of my worries, enjoy the view of the bay, and bond with my teammates while pushing each other. The feeling of satisfaction I felt when successfully completing a workout was unmatched to anything else.
I tried running at practice the day after, but there was no energy in my legs. I was feeling light-headed as I began but Coach [name of coach] finally held me back. He told me that I had to take a break for a while. I wanted to scream but I didn't have enough energy to. I had run hundreds of miles over the summer only just to feel powerless. I had to rethink everything.
My coach said I was overtraining. I was just fatiguing myself instead of giving myself the chance to recover. I felt that all the hard work I put in had gone to waste.
Hard as it was, I let his words sink in. Rather than jumping right back in, I stayed patient and thoroughly researched the needs for the perfect training where I would be improving at the fastest possible rate while also not risking my health. It was over winter where I tried a new approach. I trained in specific heart rate zones, making sure it did not go beyond my limits. I would only have 2 "hard effort" days in the week with 4 other days taking it easy and slow so that I could recover. I carefully monitored the amount of sleep I received, my diet, and my water intake. I pulled up the graphs of miles ran against heart rate and elevation to get a better understanding of where I should push harder and where I should go lighter. After a couple of weeks, I became slimmer, more toned, and more of a runner.
Slowly, confidence was surging through me. When the new track season had begun, I felt bold. In one race, I told myself to stick with the fastest runner on the track for the mile. 4 minutes and 33 seconds later I had shattered my personal best from last year by 49 seconds. Everyone on the track did not believe what they just saw. A couple of moments later, dozens of teammates wondered how I had improved so much. I was appointed captain, and under my influence, my teammates started putting on their own heart monitors. I helped them analyze their workouts, and the whole team began to elevate. I invigorated a passion across dozens to get better. My mentality of training smartly had rubbed off on the team. I banded the team together over summer nearly every day and we saw ourselves become the fastest team we had ever been in the last 4 years.
Through this journey, I learned that patience and self-care are as important as hard work when it comes to unlocking my full potential. I have built confidence in myself to make significant improvements and impacts in the fields that I am passionate about.