A Reflection on Purpose, Giving Your All, and Taking Chances: Running
The summer before my sophomore year of high school, I made a spur of the moment mental decision to try out for the Cross Country team in the fall. By all accounts, this was bound to be a failure. I’d never been on a sports team (in fact, I just got rejected from the junior varsity badminton team in the spring), and I grew up with the constant voice, whether it was peer bullying or through family, that I was “fat”. But for some reason, during that summer, although I’d never run longer than 2 miles in my life previously, I managed to get up in the morning, get out the door and run, building my mileage up to slow 10K’s by the end of the summer. I remember, during tryouts, when I barely managed to get under the tryout time (6:30 mile) to make the team — making it in 6:22 — how indescribably happy I was, wanting to break down and cry.
But the journey didn’t end there. Over the course of the next few years, I told myself that despite the fact that I started late as an athlete, I would give it my all — and that I would try to be among the best. I would go to every single “optional run” on the weekends; over the summer leading up to my senior year, I ran 110-mile weeks. During the school year, I would get up at 5AM to run, run again after school, and then after getting back home and finishing homework, go off for another end of the day recovery run. Middle-school students, who would notice me circling laps around the track for hours — many times alone — would know me by “that fast Asian runner”. My journey in running led me to some pretty cool accolades: qualifying for the regional IASAS team, being one of the top runners and beating out people who were minutes ahead of me my first year. But at the end of the day, what I remember most about being a runner was the process of growth that it pushed me to.
Running taught me discipline beyond measure. New challenges never really scare me anymore because I know that with enough effort, nothing is impossible. Running taught me how to face fear. The last 200m of a race is the toughest thing in the world — you’re pushing your body to the limits, and you’re holding out a competitor right beside you. But you can never relent. During my final race in Cross Country, a regional race in Bangkok, Thailand, I couldn’t even remember the last minute of the race. My body was gone, but my mind took me to the finish.
And beyond all of this, running taught me about family. We joke about “bonding through pain”, but I forged the closest relationships I’ve ever had through the sport — waking up early in the morning to train, spending the entire weekend watching races and dreaming about the future, completing a 24-Hour Race for Human Trafficking, in which each of us ran more than 50 kilometers over the time span. Running taught me my love for education and inspiring others. As a high-school student, I often spent my weekends and free time coaching middle-school runners. When six of my runners won the championship race the year after I graduated, it was the most electrifying feeling in the world.
Athletically, I may be the furthest thing from a runner right now. I compete in powerlifting, where we purposefully and methodically gain weight in order to lift the most amount of weight. And professionally, as a recent graduate (Go Cats!) going into a one-year masters program, things seem to be moving so fast. I’m pursuing a passion in data science that I only recently discovered, I’m going into the workforce in a foreign country navigating the landscape of rejected visas and income taxes. And truly, sometimes thinking about it as a whole can be overwhelming.
But when I look back and break it down — running taught me the biggest life lesson: the hardest part is getting out of the door. And all those little moments have taught me to take things step by step. We’ve done this before. What seems impossible will be possible. You just have to keep at it. Never would I have done the things I’ve accomplished at college without the mentality running had pushed me to create: whether it was being taken completely out of left-field when I got my first C in a math class my freshman year (my academic strength), switching out of my major, and ending up facing my fears and graduating with Honors in Math. Or founding and leading three organizations from the ground up in my time in college, or being the only male cheerleader, or taking up a completely new sport and making it to the national level. All of it was connected to a fundamental mentality that I had created for myself through embracing and giving my all to the unknown.
I’m certainly not qualified to give any sort of advice, but if you were to take something from my story, the biggest life lesson I’ve ever learned was that giving my all to something I would have never believed my path to end up on was the thing that shaped who I am today. So if you have the urge to accomplish something, I encourage you to follow that urge, but do it right — and give it everything you have.
