Never stay down, in the end, it will pay off.

Right now I'm a junior in High School in Pennsylvania. I run on a pretty competitive team, and we had high expectations for the State Meet this year. The State Championship for Pennsylvania was last weekend on the fourth. The race didn't go very well. I was about twenty seconds slower, and twenty places farther back than I expected to be. The team didn't finish that well either. We were expected to be around seventh or so, but we finished eleventh. Despite the fact that the state meet didn't go well, the season was pretty spectacular. I went under sixteen for the first time at the District meet, which is the meet used to qualify for states. Our fastest runner had multiple races under sixteen, and everyone on the team saw big improvements from last season. I was really excited to see the team excel the way they did this year.

But this isn't about how great this season was, or how we felt about the state meet. This is about my sophomore track season. Going into my sophomore track season my coaches and I had big goals for the 3200m. I was really excited for the season to start. If I met my goal it would put me in state qualifying position, and I really wanted to make it to states, and go as fast as I could. So in the preseason I started increasing my mileage, and doing a lot of hard speed workouts that my coaches were prescribing. I was tired, but I was happy, because I felt good, and I felt like I was gearing up for a really good season.

The first meet of the season was just a dual meet, but I came out really strong. I didn't run the 3200m in the first meet but I PR'd in the 1600m and the 400m, and ran a solid 800m. I felt strong, and I didn't feel like I was pushing that hard to get my times. In the next couple dual meets I felt good and my times were still solid, but soon after that I started struggling. I was running slower in the dual meets, and feeling more and more tired. When we got to the first invitational meet of the season I had high hopes for my 3200m time. I didn't quite go as fast as I was hoping, but I still got a small PR, and I was happy to be getting faster. I still had a lot of other meets to improve in anyway.

As the season went on I felt worse and worse. I took more rest, tried to sleep more, did less large speed workouts, but that didn't help at all. My times continued to get slower, and I wasn't feeling any better. It got to the point where I only had two meets left to reach my goal of state qualifying. Conference and Districts. I was starting to feel better, and I still believed I could reach my goal. But at Conference I ran my slowest time of the season

After the race I just cooled down, grabbed my stuff, and went home with my parents before the meet finished. I was so disappointed. I felt broken. Even though I was the team's second runner in the 3200m, and I knew they would need me at the District meet if we were going to beat our rivals, I felt like I couldn't bring myself to finish the season. I was hopeless, and I didn't know what I was going to do. But the day after Conference I went for a long run, and I thought over it for a bit, and it didn't take long for me to realize I couldn't let myself quit. My team needed me, and if I had quit then it would have been a struggle to come back. 

The week before Districts I felt completely spent. I had nothing left. I knew I wasn't going to run well at Districts, but I kept trying to prepare for the meet, and I wasn't going to quit. At the District meet I felt really good. I warmed up well, I had had a great pre-meet the day before. I was ready to PR. I knew I wasn't going to qualify for States, I had let that go, but I was confident that I could bring a good time out of the season somehow. But after going out feeling good I bombed in the second half of the race, and ended up three seconds slower than I was at Conference. That was it. I was done. I could officially say that the season was terrible and I was completely done with it.

I took a couple weeks off after Districts. I saw the team practicing for the State Meet after school when I was on the bus waiting to leave. I was happy for them, but it hurt. I felt like I was supposed to be there, that I had been cheated of an opportunity. I had to take a long hard look at my relationship with running in that time. But as much as I hated it in that momement, I knew I could never quit. I could never stay down.

I had some bloodwork done while I was training over the summer for XC, and found out I had an iron deficiency. After finding some medication to take I started feeling really good. I put my sophomore outdoor season behind me. I was ready for XC to start.

With the medication, and a new training program our coaches had found, I had the best XC season of my life. I was fifth at our Conference meet, right behind one of my rivals. Two weeks later I was second at Districts in 15:59, my first time under sixteen minutes, and I beat my rival from Conference. The team won the meet pretty easily. I was thrilled. I had met my goal for the XC season (going under sixteen), and the team was looking great. It payed off. I had to wait. I had to put my faith in my coaches, in the process, in a sport that seemed to keep letting me down. I had to wade through the swamp to get to the other side. It wasn't fun, it made me angry, it made me depressed at times, and it made me feel broken. But in the end it was worth it. While that State Meet didn't go that well for the team, or for me individually, I'm not letting that deter me. A couple of my teammates and I are going to Foot Locker Northeast Regionals. So I'm going to have to be patient, and I'm going to have to trust my training routine to prepare me for the race.

Cross Country and Track are the hardest sports there are. They're made even harder when it seems like you keep trying, and pushing yourself, but are continuing to get slower and slower. It takes a true iron will to get through season where you don't improve, or feel good at all. But when you do get through that season, when you come out alive on the other side, you come back mentally tougher than you were before. And after that, if you've been patient, if you've been waiting for your improvement, then it will come. It could take a season, it could take a year, it could take longer, but it will come. Never stay down, because it pays off in the end.

- @runisham ( Owen Isham )