“My family does a lot of running. Both my parents compete in marathons, and my siblings are athletic. In 4th grade, I decided to participate in my first triathlon. I immediately hated running, and I told myself I would never run again.

After [the triathlon], my mom and I would go to Memorial Park to spend time together and go for runs. That’s when I started warming up to running. At Pin Oak, I joined cross country, and that was when I started to get back into [running] competitively. My first race was extremely hard. However, I ended up placing 14th out of a big competition. I felt proud, but I also thought I could have done better. That thought motivated me to keep training and compete more.

The summer when I was going to high school, I wanted to train to get into state and regionals. But the problem was I went to these camps with high schoolers who were highly trained and very competitive. That’s when I started to realize the stuff I was doing was too advanced and I didn’t have the strength to do it. The more I trained, the more I noticed a persistent pain in my legs that continued everyday. That’s when my parents made me go to a physical therapy clinic, where I was told that I had a stress fracture.

I was terrified that I would never be able to run again. What was supposed to be a month and a half of recovery dragged on. One month turned into two which turned into three months totaling to four months of waiting that felt like it had stretched on for ages. The saying that you never truly appreciate what you have until you lose it had never felt more true.

Despite the pain that my injury had caused me, a lot of positive moments came from it. The biggest [impact] that my injury had on me was the introduction to physical therapy. Even before I got injured I had always considered one day becoming a physical therapist. The idea of getting to help people had been a dream of mine for a while. When I started physical therapy, I struggled with the idea that the exercises I was doing would [ever] actually allow me to get back to running. My doubt allowed me to see how extreme our minds can cause us to interpret events in the moment.”