I have always been someone who needs to talk about something until I feel like I am fully over it. My weekly calls with my sister often loop around to something that I’m still processing from when I was five or pondering our teenage existences.
Now, I’m facing something that I’ve been pretending to be okay with for almost two years. I hadn’t really talked about it because I knew that I was not okay with it and was not ready to accept it. It also just feels dumb in the grand scheme of things, so I assumed that the feelings would subside.
Last summer, I had to quit college athletics. Long story short, I had a year-long injury streak and bad bones. Freshman year, it felt like everything in my life had built up to running in college—because it had. I couldn’t imagine going to a college and not running. I couldn’t imagine not identifying as an athlete.
Running wasn’t only something I found solace in, but it was my main source of validation and identity. From an outside perspective, I had very little going for me in high school. I had crippling anxiety and struggled to talk to my peers, but the one thing that everyone knew about me was that I loved to run and I was good at it.
So, in my first year at St. Bonaventure, I fully adopted my new life with my teammates, and it gave me a disgusting amount of confidence. That year, I became someone I both loved and hated. I was obnoxiously opinionated, but I was open to taking risks, and I was a bubbly and loyal friend. I’ve already written about the immediate effects of my injury, so I digress. But I can’t help but wonder if that version of myself would have carried into the rest of my time in college.
For a long time, I grieved the person I missed out on becoming and the experiences I missed. In that grief, however, there was some hope that I would make it back.Â
Although, to be honest, I think I always knew that I didn’t have it in me to come back. Call it a loss of love or a lack of perseverance, but I would also just call myself a quitter.
I have been struggling with these feelings again recently because I just raced after a two-year hiatus. After quitting, I signed up for a half marathon, frankly because I didn’t know what else to do.
It wasn’t to prove to my former coach that he was wrong for calling me a waste of money and saying that I “would never be good again,” because he would be right on both of those points.Â
I don’t think it was for myself either. I kept thinking that I would have an epiphany at some point during the race to figure out why I was making myself run 13 miles. It never came.
The race wasn’t triumphant either. I’m proud of myself for getting back on the horse, but I also can’t pretend that the horse didn’t kick my ass and buck me right off. It was humiliating to have the people who saw you at your best and who would talk about your big goals—like breaking five minutes in the mile—watch you trudging along.
Now I’m thinking that the half marathon was a spot for clean closure. Of course, it couldn’t have come at a worse time. I’m trying to close a chapter that should be at its best part. As my friends get ready to race their last A10s for cross country, I’m watching from the sidelines, wishing that I could be there with them.Â
I normally talk about quitting the team like it was the best choice I’ve ever made, but I am both heartbroken and embarrassed by the decision. I would have loved to have been a little stronger and able to redeem myself. I would have loved to have lived out the rest of my dreams that I worked toward for ten years.
I have to learn to move on. I’m no longer a comparatively outstanding athlete or even just an injured team member. In fact, my life has very little to do with running right now. It’s an odd kind of dissonance. I know that, realistically, I would have just gotten injured, but I wish that things would have gone differently.