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I Found Peace in The Moving Words of A Basketball Star
As long as I did my best, it was not a failure
As a special education teacher, law student, and marathon runner, I have always been devastated by failure and any time I did not perform up to my expectations. When I was in high school, I thought I was a failure every time I ran a bad race. If I ran a poor race (which was somewhat often), I would spend all day thinking about it, and even all weekend after thinking about it. Because I took running so seriously, I would spend the whole day before the race nervous that I was going to fail.
One example of when my anxiety crippled me as a runner was a track meet in eighth grade. When I was in eighth grade, I was the two mile runner on my team, which was the longest distance event that could have been run. I was the fastest two mile runner of the two or three people who decided to do it, as no other middle school runner wanted to run the two mile since the sprints were deemed more appealing. I would win races by whole minutes by virtue of no one else wanting to do it. I ran somewhere in the 12 minutes, which was alright for a middle schooler.
However, there was one race where the other runner on the other team was faster than me. He wasn’t a lot better, and I could ideally run and keep up with him. It was one of the last races…
