So, this is....weird. I've never had a blog before or written anything that random people can view and I can't guarantee that if you read this you will find it interesting but here it goes......

Track season.  The glorious time of year where you practice everyday after school, wake up sore, and put pressure on yourself to be the best. I have been doing this for three years now and I still worry, I still feel sick, I still complain and yet I'm the veteran that should absolutely love running till my heart bursts and my head pops. So if people have expectations for me and I have expectations for myself why is it that I'm not were I imagined I would be? Junior year, three year Varsity sprinter invited to multiple invitationals and CIF twice, the winner of several awards and yet I'm not standing in the spot I would like to see myself in.

I have struggled with trying to make my life perfect and track is one of the larger puzzle pieces. I set all of these expectations for myself, told myself I am going to be the best, smash records, get scholarships. But how can I achieve these things when I'm terrified of every race? What am I terrified of though? I don't fear running out of my lane, I don't fear falling but what I do fear is time. It's not the fear of getting last, not the horror of someone passing you but the horror of not improving, not getter stronger, or better, or faster. That is what I fear.

Perhaps it's all in my head, it is possible that I'm just tired of running but I can't think like that because the season is here. Again, time is making me cower in a corner. I used to lie in bed Wednesday night before a meet and imagine what my races would look like but now I think that actually held me back. I found a quote awhile ago that I will remember forever it goes, "What screws us up most in life is the picture in our head of how it is supposed to be". This quote has made me think of not just track differently but the way I live my life as well.

I most often run the 400m dash which is really not a dash at all, one lap around the track. I hate this race. I would love to run the 100m or participate in the 200m race more but when it comes to the 400m I despise it. It never hit me why I hate that race but at this very moment I realized why. I hate it because I can think during the race. It refers back to the quote up above, about having a picture in your mind of how something is supposed to be and that's what I'm doing as I'm running around the track.

Holy smokes I wrote a lot. Well I enjoy writing (or in this case typing) so that's why and writing this made me feel better not only about myself but in the way I live my life. I hope that if you had the strength to read all of this you compared it to something in your life whether it's relationships, school, or the future. Humans strive for perfection and it's a topic I bring up often and the bottom line is that nothing is going to turn out exactly how you imagine it so don't do it in the first place.

~Jack