Although I consider myself don’t have special talent for sports or belong to born for sports group, I like to play sports and tried different kinds of them. But among all them, running is my weakest spot.
The main reason is, I don’t have much stamina to run fast. When I was a kid, I always terrified when I was going to have physical examination, especially running. On different level of my school year, I had 100 meters dash, 1 km run, 2 km run and 5 km run. Sometimes those distances were measured by how many laps we should run on a field.
My teacher would tell us that we’re going to run for, let’s say, 10 laps and the ideal time would be, let’s say, 20-25 minutes, and boys are expected to be faster than girls. If we do backwards calculation, it would mean that we should finish 1 lap by 2 mins. This could be easy for someone who like to run, but not for me. Besides, our grade for PA subject will be determined from how well you are on each PE. Like how fast you run, how many sit up you managed to do within certain number of time, how many lay ups you can score, and many more.
Back to running and my lack of stamina. What I did was training myself weeks before the test take place. I woke up earlier, ran at track field nearby my house, even my mom accompanied me occasionally. I tried to run complete, let’s say, 5 laps without walking or stopping. Just run.
Then I realized something. Every time I know that I’m going to run some distance and I’m still in the beginning of the run, I will save my energy, find my rhythm, and breathe in and out on a certain pace. I also told myself, just finish this lap, just keep running one step and one step, to keep going. After one lap, I told myself the same thing again, and again. Repeat it until I realize that I’m running my last lap. I surprised that I can finish it.
Morale of the story is we often think that the problem that we have now is too big or too difficult to solve. When we think that we can’t do it then we will never be able to do it. Actually, when we focus on what we have (our strength, knowledge) and do one thing at a time, the problem is not that big anymore. That’s because we tend to think too far ahead.
