Looking back at 2011 (Part 1)

I finally finished my first semester of junior year! This was a crazy semester for me filled with new experiences and challenges. One thing that was challenging, a new experience, and took up a majority of my weekends and afternoons was this year's season of cross country.

It was the first year I made top 20 for cross country. Not only that, but I even managed to make top 7 (varsity), which seemed like a ridiculous goal at the beginning of summer training back in May. I was opened up to a whole new world of information about running. Each run had a specific purpose and every mile was significant. We would spend our Sunday mornings and Monday and Wednesday afternoons running around aimlessly for hours at a nearby park. I developed several new relationships with my fellow teammates as we would share hilarious stories, recaps of our exciting weekends, and secrets that we would only share among each other. Tuesday and Thursday mornings meant waking up at 5:15 am to meet up with the team at the school and do workouts on the cold and dewy football practice fields.Our Thursday nights were spent at a senior's house as we chowed down on pasta and Cesar salad. It wasn't unusual to miss out on the Friday night football games in order to get an adequate amount of sleep, properly rest our legs, and avoid being lectured by our coach for figuring out we spent the night out at a football game when we could have been hydrating. We didn't mind be cooped up in a white van for countless hours to travel to far away meets. The most exciting part of making top 7 was the honor of racing at the state meet. This picture is me with 6 other teammates praying before the state meet. We went into the meet confident that we would steal the state title, but we ended up taking home the 3rd place trophy. Although we were disappointed, it was an amazing end to an amazing season. I couldn't have asked for a better team or better season.