Literacy

My name is Jessica Souza and I am literate in the sport of competitive running.  It sounds funny, but I promise that it is more challenging than you would guess.  In fact, it was much more challenging than I would have guessed when I signed up for my middle school’s cross country team in 8th grade.  My mom insisted that I find an extra-curricular activity and assured me that cross country would simply be running.  I was told that students wouldn’t have to try out and that there would be no “cuts, so I hesitantly joined.  Now, I’ll be honest and say that I wasn’t the greatest person on the team, but I realized that running took a lot of hard work and dedication, but it was also very rewarding.

          

I eagerly attended the meeting for cross country runners in the fall of my freshman year of high school.  I could tell that this year was going to be different.  Our coach was already mapping out our training schedule, and there was a legacy to live up to.  A few years before I started high school there was a female cross country star whose picture was in our hall of fame.  The second I saw her picture, the goal started to form in my mind.  She was the role model that I had never met.  Practices grew longer and I could feel my body getting into shape.  This was when I started to become literate in running. 

           There are two elements to running; mental and physical.  Mentally, you are racing yourself, your past times and trying to prove to yourself that you can work harder.  When the gun goes off, you have to think strategically about the run.  You have to run out fast enough to get a good place (too close and you’ll die out, too far and you won’t have much of a chance to move up) but you have to know when to settle in and start pacing yourself too.  The hardest part is deciding when to kick!  This is different for every person, because it depends on how long you can sprint.  I’ve seen people start before they can see the finish line and they pick off every person in their path.  At the same time, I’ve seen people so out of breath that they had no energy to kick at the end.  For me, I knew my kick was short, but if there was someone within distance to challenge me, I could pass them in a flash.  The other mental component was when you started to feel pain or discomfort.  Like when you start to get anxious and your stomach is filled with butterflies and cramps and your mind begs you to stop.  Or with a mile to go, your legs are burning and you know that you have the opportunity to stop and walk, but do you decide to take it?  Your mind is flooded with different thoughts, but can your body handle all of these emotions along with the physical labor?

           This brings me to the physical element of running.  Something that every runner has to become literate in, is their training schedule.  We would run a long distance super slow on a Monday to stretch our muscles, then Tuesday’s practice would be an average length at race-pace.  On Wednesday’s we would do hill workouts and timed laps to improve our speed, and Thursday’s we would have another race-pace run.  On Friday’s we would either run an easy work out (if there was a meet that weekend) or run another slow but long distance.  The most important thing to know about training is that the more miles you are used to running, the easier your short race distance will feel. 

           Throughout my years as a runner I became more and more literate through practice and my relationships with various coaches.  There was my coach from middle school, three different coaches from high school and off-season I practiced with a local team which had the most impact on me and my training.  Here I learned about specific stretches and how they would help me prepare for practice or a race.  We also talked about race strategies and that it is helpful to run with a partner and talk during practice, because it will help regular your breathing.  This led me to become the fastest girl on my high school team during my senior year.

My entire experience of running cross country has impacted my life in many ways.  I have learned to respect the amount of work that people put into anything they are passionate about (who knew that running would be so hard?!) and that hard work always pay off in the end.  I knew when I put 100% into my workouts and those were the races where I broke my personal records.  At the same time, I knew when I was cheating myself out of a good workout and it showed at that race.  I would love to use the idea of setting a goal and working towards it in the classroom.  I want students to beat their personal records (grades, writing ability...etc) and strive to achieve the best quality of work they can!  Running is also a great stress reliever and I would encourage anyone to try it out (it doesn’t have to be competitively).  Cross country taught me about friendships, coaching and it helped me to understand myself better.  I would have never imagined that I would belong to a junior olympic team, or that I my team would make it the nationals (twice!).  Running taught me a lot about the sport, but even more about myself.