Big News
One night in December I sat on the floor of my bedroom next to my boyfriend, Emilio, while we talked about the future. Somewhere on the topic of feeling extremely stressed out, I laughed at a crazy idea.
“What if I totally uprooted my life, changed my major, ran for a different school in a different state, and met new people? What if I redid everything I thought I had already figured out as a senior in high school?”
We both rolled our eyes and changed the subject. That would be insane.
Flash forward to March, and I found myself doing just that. Looking around at the city of Reno, Nevada, I saw myself feeling like I belonged. I had long conversations with Coach Elias about what I wanted to accomplish, I met with the head of the Nutrition/Dietetics program, I watched practice, I hung out with the team, and I loved it. So, I made the decision to transfer. A once passing thought became a reality. But, I’m sure you want to know what brought me here.
So, now I’ll take you back for a different moment. Sitting in my car after receiving a phone call that the head coach, who recruited me in high school, had been fired. I thought back to a conversation with a friend where we decided if the year kept going downhill, as it had since we returned from summer, we would make the choice to leave. This was that breaking point. It was time to see what else was out there for me. I didn’t want to be a Physical Therapist anymore. While it was a job I’ve always admired, I didn’t want to go to school for that long and I stopped feeling like I was going to love what I was doing. My passion for nutrition grew at the end of last year when I found myself in a complicated relationship with food. I didn’t know if I was properly fueling my body so I started doing research on how food can be like medicine to an active body. The research fascinated me and I found myself wanting to learn more and more. I also loved to bake and cook which is how I started developing my own recipes. It felt like the perfect fit for me, but my current university didn’t offer the program.“Maybe this isn’t the place for you. I know a lot of other schools who offer the Nutrition program,” someone once said to me.
The idea during that time was just a passing thought. Something I knew I needed to do, but was too scared to do it. I wanted to train, run indoor track, and see what opportunities my progress would bring. I had a decent indoor season, PRed by 30 seconds in the 3000m, killed all my workouts and felt like I was starting to scratch the surface of my running potential. Then, I got injured, for the third time since June. A stress fracture in the summer, IT Band Syndrome through cross country (a different story for another time), and now an injured calf from running too long in dead shoes. I couldn’t finish the season. I couldn’t run for 10 weeks. The mistakes piled up with the snow that winter and I felt trapped in our tiny town. I had never wanted to be home so bad. And, while I was surrounded by people who wanted to help me, I felt completely alone. I began to associate my school as a place of pain, a place that was sucking the life out of me.
I knew that this injury would label me as “injury Prone Runner” in big red letters right across my forehead. I felt like I should just wear it as a sign so people would stop wondering why I wasn’t running, again. But, Coach Elias didn’t see that. He just saw the errors I made and we planned to make the changes my body needed to be successful, and healthy. I knew that was what I ultimately needed. I needed something different, a different approach to training, a different atmosphere, and that’s what UNR was able to offer.
Through this process I have come to terms with the reality of being a collegiate athlete, let alone a collegiate distance runner. It’s not for the weak minded. Any experienced athlete knows the emotional torment that comes with injury. It brought me to a dark place far too many times. I was given three different excuses to quit this year, but instead decided I just needed a different perspective. I entered college with one plan. I wanted to run, major in Exercise Science, finish school and my eligibility in four years, get into PT school, and have my life all figured out. I wasn’t going to be someone who changed their mind half way through, I wasn’t going to get injured and fall of the grid. It was supposed to just keep getting better and better. But, while the perfect plan almost never works out, I have learned to accept the process and take the road less traveled.
I am so thankful for the people who have believed in me up to this point. I am lucky that I was recruited to Eastern Washington after my senior year of high school. I am who I am today because of what I’ve learned in these two years of college and Cheney will always hold a special place in my heart. I don’t have anything negative to say about the program because it ultimately came down to my personal decision. This year, I went by the famous saying, “if you don’t like how the table is set, turn over the table.” So, here’s to calling my sophomore year, a year of growth, not failure. And, here’s to big things down the road.
