Running by Another Sun

My illness wasn’t a failure, but it did teach me more than success

At the end of the summer before my junior year of high school, I was struck with the worst cold I have ever experienced. The night before the virus took hold of me, I drove to the country with two cross country teammates in tow to the grand event of the summer.

This was the last team get-together before the bustle of a fresh school year and season. I was to have a spot on the varsity team, something I had vied for since freshman year. The head coach had even called me into his office to have a talk with me about how I should be prepared to step into one of the seven varsity positions. I was more than ready; two years is a lifetime when you’re 16, and I’d been training for two lifetimes.

The bonfire crackled in the middle of the circle of heat-fatigued but noisily chattering girls. All the runs that week had been motivated by this moment of rest and firelight, and I was not going to miss it for sniffles and a headache.

But the morning after the bonfire, I woke up to an undeniable cold and the story of the rest of my season. “No, you shouldn’t run today, you should recover,” my coach said one day, the other, “Maybe just run a couple of miles.” This was not going to be the season I had envisioned.

My muscles screamed, my arms pulled at the air, and my times slowed. It was harder to run than ever, and all the training I’d done — especially over that whole summer — was going to waste. All those early-morning huff-and-puff sessions. Running is already hard, but I was suffering.

What I didn’t know is that my team and its culture had prepared me well for these circumstances. I now found myself unable to escape. My perspective on the sport expanded. I now saw it as my primary goal to lift the girls around me. My race performance became secondary out of necessity; I couldn’t look at my times for too long, or take too much stock in my pain because they were not going to give me the results that would satisfy the level of competition I thought I’d reach.

I did not run to reach varsity anymore. Instead, I ran for the girls on my team who also ran for me. I became an aware member of my team’s ecosystem. Instead, I cheered harder and louder than ever. I learned how to move on from profound disappointment, and that there is no reward for your skill at wallowing in it. On some level, I understood that time is too precious to waste on rumination. I did not win any races (well, I guess I hadn’t been before either), but I worked to win my own battle at each meet.

I never did run on the varsity cross country team in high school. But I did learn that I was — most importantly — part of something beyond myself: my team.

Years later, that’s what I remember most of my years on the high school cross country team. In fact, it’s what I found that I value most. I’m just glad that I learned it early in life.