My first day of practice had finally arrived! This Wednesday I was cleared and now I’m back on track…literally. I couldn’t stop smiling through all of practice (even though you couldn’t see it, since we have to wear masks). It felt great to be practicing with my teammates, starting a new chapter to a book that has been closed and getting dusty on a shelf for the past year and a half. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though. A year and a half is a long time to go without your sport, and especially when transitioning from high school to D1 level. As of right now I’m training with the short sprinters to ease myself back in, and a few weeks I’ll be back with my 200-400 group.
Transitioning from virtually no training at all to D1 level training has been quite a challenge. I’m very out of shape and my body isn’t used to these strenuous workouts. From what I’ve gathered so far, college workouts are similar to high school workouts with one small but significant difference: rest time. While in high school we would do a 200 and then rest for a few minutes, in college, our “rest time” is a circuit including core exercises and plyometrics. It keeps your heart-rate up and makes your breathing heavier when you start the next set. I also never lifted weights in high school, so that has definitely been a learning experience as well. When I was recruited, I was told this was a good thing, because if I could run those times without weight training, I could improve immensely once I started. It’s been a challenging adjustment, but exciting nonetheless!
Another exciting development is that we got our headshots taken! It still feels surreal to see my name and my face on the 2020-2021 Penn State Track & Field Roster. There was a significant time period where I genuinely thought I lost the opportunity to run in college due to my injury, so I feel so grateful every single day to be where I am now. This picture is a reminder that I made it! I wish I could show it to my last-year self and tell her not to lose hope, and instead to keep her head up and be patient. Her time would come.
