RUNNING
I Was a Mediocre College Athlete, and That’s Ok
What I learned and unlearned from college sports
Continuing to run cross-country and track in college after being moderately successful in high school was a given for me. It never occurred to me not to continue running. I wasn’t looking specifically for a running school, though. I was looking for a pre-med program. I happen to find a small school with a good pre-med program that also happened to have a new coach taking over the cross-country and track teams, one who was aggressively recruiting athletes as the school got ready to transition from Div 2 to Div 1. He took all of us big fish from the small ponds of high school sports and asked if we were ready to be a strong band of small fish that would take on a big pond.
I honestly don’t remember much about Div 2 and Div 1, and how many meets we won as a team. But I remember we had some very strong individual runners and we surprised a lot of the bigger, more established college teams. Our coach found our individual strengths and knew how to get each of us to focus on them. Mine were hills and endurance. I loved a difficult cross-country course full of hills and mud. For weekend-long track meets he’d put me in the 10,000M, the 5,000M, and the 3,000M races, all three run over the course of 24 hours, and I’d place in all of them. I remember my friends and how it was easy to choose a track meet on the day before graduation over all the school activities.
I was inspired to write about this after reading this story by Chauncey Simmons:
And I did learn all the important things, like teamwork, leadership, and discipline. Track is one of those sports where an individual can excel even if the rest of the team does not, but it still helps the team if you are gracious and supportive. It’s easy to make friends from other schools on the track because there’s plenty of downtime between events to chat. I learned how to survive bus travel, noisy hotels and shared rooms, and how to budget my money for meals.
But I also learned that after I graduated, I could run however and whenever I wanted to. No longer having daily practice and workouts was a freedom I hadn’t known since I was 14. I could pick and choose my races and the distances. I could give up on speed work to concentrate on going slow and having fun. I could run at any time of day I wanted without having to coordinate with several other people. It was a balance that I didn’t even know I was lacking.
My relationship with running has been on and off over the years but I always go back to it. To me, it’s the easiest way to stay healthy and stay in shape because even though a lot of people will tell you you need this gear and this app and you have to eat these foods, for most casual runners, no you don’t need all that stuff. (It’s okay if you want that stuff. But you don’t need it.)
You need a comfortable pair of shoes and a desire to move your feet. I assume I will always have that.
