My legs are tense, pumped up, ready to go. They know what’s coming. They know that they will soon want to slow down, soon be begging for me to not go any further, but they also know that I won’t listen. I’ll push them on until even I want to stop, but there’s no way that I will. Stopping isn’t an option until I have reached the very end. But as for right now, my legs feel ready. Strong. Powerful. Unstoppable. No, they feel more than that. I feel like my legs could take me over mountains, through oceans, all the way around the world. I’m not going quite that far today though.

It’s my very first cross-country meet. It’s what I’ve been preparing for the last few weeks. It’s the first time I’ve ever done anything like this, besides a few 5ks here and there. So I’m not expecting to blow past everyone and be crowned champion, but I also don’t want to faint at the end and have to be rushed to the hospital. (That happened to my cousin. She had just ran a marathon which is a little longer than the 1.8 miles I’m about to run, but, yeah, I guess I could still place this race in the same category, maybe.) I’m nervous, knowing that it’s going to be hard. There’s also the fear of losing hanging like a cloud over me, because I know that most people who call themselves a cross-country runner is probably faster than me. But I force myself not to worry about that. I like running, I tell myself. You’re going to have fun.
I remember the first time I really liked running. Maybe you could say the first time I discovered running, even. I was in fifth grade. My gym teacher had this big thing about making everyone run around the gym for five minutes. I would jog really slowly, so I could talk to my friends. That way, I could make the running bearable because running is the opposite of easy for me. When the five minutes were up, my gym teacher told us to run as fast as we possibly could around the gym for thirty seconds. This was intriguing to me. Didn’t thirty seconds sound like a long time to be at maximum capacity sprinting level? I thought I would run pretty fast for about fifteen seconds then slow down and marvel at how fast other people could run. I’d done that a lot before. Well, that was what I figured I was going to do. That’s not what happened at all. When the gym teacher told us to start, I sprinted as fast as I could, and I didn’t slow down. I tore past other people. That’s when I felt it. It’s practically impossible to describe. Even though I was running hard, I didn’t feel pain at all. I felt like I was floating. Flying. Soaring. I kept this insane pace throughout the whole time, and when the thirty seconds were up, the feeling went away. But even then, I knew I had just experienced something special. My friends caught up to me. I turned to them and said, “That was incredible! That was amazing! Did you feel it? Did you feel it too?” They kind of looked at me funny and started talking about something else. I was disappointed until my gym teacher said we were going to try it one more time. That time, I was still flying, but I felt the pain. Buring, red hot fire in my legs. Not as astonishing as the first time around, but still pretty amazing. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to get that feeling again.

So maybe that’s what keeps me running, even though other people are way better than me, even though it’s hard and painful, even though I’m not that fast. I want to experience that feeling again. I’ve gotten flashes of it, like when I’m about to finish my personal record mile time and even though I want to stop/lay down/cry/throw up, even though I can barely breath and when I do it’s raspy and rough, even though I’m in agonizing pain, even though I feel all of those things, when I only have about 200m left, I just go all out towards the end.. I can feel the figurative finish line coming closer and closer and that’s when the fire comes out. I push myself faster and it burns stronger, just like the second time I ran as fast as I could in gym class in fifth grade. The fire rages on until I’m engulfed in flames, on the verge of collapsing, but triumphantly finishing the race, or the mile or whatever it is. It takes a while to cool off, those flames. But I’m happy.

That’s what I thought about as the bus takes the girls to the meets. Maybe I’ll feel the fire again today. It helped to build my excitement, but with each meter the bus goes, my nervousness built until I wanted to puke and quit the race I hadn’t started yet. Don’t think of it as a race, I told myself. Just think about it as a run. A run without any pressure. Ha. Like I could really believe that.

The bus unloaded. It had been a long drive, but when it stopped I wished for it to be longer. We could just drive on forever and I wouldn’t have cared. That sounded more fun than running 1.8 miles in a cross-country meet. I stepped off the bus and surveyed the scene. All the boys had finished, and their standing around with red faces. This is going to be hard.

I dropped off my stuff and adjusted my jersey for the thousandth time. Once it had been because my jersey needed adjusting but it quickly morphed into a nervous habit with no point. I looked down at my hands. Most of the nails had been bitten off. This was new for me. I almost never bit my nails. I actually had a bad habit of letting them grow way too long. This just showed exactly how anxious I was.
We did a warm-up run on the first part of the trail. “This is the easiest part of the course so really push yourself here.” One of my coaches had said. What? I screamed inside my head. This wasn’t easy! This was on gravel! Running on tiny fragments of rock makes everything so much harder. By the time the warm-up was over, I was already tired. This made me mad at myself that I was tired before the race even started and it also made me (you guessed it!) even more nervous. This was not going to be good.

We had about a minute to situate ourselves on the starting line. I wasn’t that tired anymore. My legs are tense, pumped up, ready to go. They know what’s coming. They know that they will soon want to slow down, soon be begging for me to not go any further, but they also know that I won’t listen. I’ll push them on until even I want to stop, but there’s no way that I will. Stopping isn’t an option until I have reached the very end. Until I have reached the very end and felt the fire.

A guy comes up and tells us that we will go when the whistle blows. You can do this, I think. It’s going to be hard but you can do it. I put one foot forward on the starting line but then re-evaluate and put my other foot forward. Then I evaluate the re-evaluation and switch feet again. Stop! I yell at myself. Just stop and focus! So I take a deep breath and look forward. Not at the other runners or the finish line, but forward.

I’m ready.

The whistle blows, and I’m off.