Being the best is not what made me happy.

I have been a runner for most of my life. I joined the cross country team in the fifth grade, and from the start, I was good at it. I was a hard worker and had always been the best on the team, and even throughout high school I continued to thrive and improve. I had suffered a few injuries here and there, but nothing that really set me back.

Of course being the fastest was great and all, but it was not easy. At the start of my sophomore year I began to face crippling anxiety surrounding racing. I lived with the worry that one day one of my teammates were going to beat me, along with the constant pressure that I would have to support my team and be successful for them. It felt like everyone’s eyes were always on me, and I was afraid of what would happen if one day I didn’t do as well as I usually did. I had never really wanted to succeed to be proud of myself, but instead, I wanted to perform well because I thought that would make people like me better. I wanted to impress and please my coaches, family, and friends. I thought that my self worth was based on the fact that I was the best runner on the team.

I dealt with this constant struggle throughout my sophomore and junior years of cross country and track. Practices, and meet days especially, I was paralyzed with uncomfortable and almost unmanageable anxiety. Throughout my day, I would have this sick, worried feeling in the pit of my stomach. Even when my body was clutched with hunger, to my brain, food was not appealing. During my races, I would gasp for air; I was drowning and panicking and I felt so hopeless. Although it never really had an impactful hamper on my performance, it did set me back, and it was hard to find the joy in running anymore. I wanted to quit every day.

My senior year of cross country, I was finally outrun, and to my surprise, my world didn’t end. Everything was the same as how it has always been and everyone still loved me the same. I realized that I ended up preferring to not be the best anymore because it really helped with my anxiety. It was a huge weight lifted off of my shoulders and an end to this pressure that had been holding me down. I learned that no matter if I was the best or the worst runner on the team, all of my friends and community would love me as equally as before because it is my personality that they like to be around, and they weren’t my friends just because I was fast. I also learned that just because I wasn’t the best runner on the team didn’t mean that I wasn’t a good runner, and it didn’t make me any less of the leader or the captain that I was.

I learned that being the best runner on the cross country team isn’t what made me happy, and that cross country made me happy because it gave me the community of loving and supportive friends that I got to hang out with and make memories with almost every day of the year. My senior year of cross country was one of the most valuable to me because not only was my anxiety no longer holding me back, but I learned my own self worth and became more confident and happy with who I was. I was able to focus on the relationships I made with my teammates and be an encouraging and supportive role model to them, and hopefully to teach them that no matter what struggles you go through, you can overcome them, and they will help you grow as a person, learn something about yourself, and be happier overall.