View Workout (Corey Williams)

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live and die

February 1, 2015 (Morning)

Exercise Type: Run

Comments:
it has been such a long time, ironically, that i thought about running while i was on a run. its really absurd that that's true but running really has just become something i do because... well i dont have anything better to do. but for some reason i was feeling all nostalgic and stuff. and i was thinking abotu why i used to love to run. even why i started to run. i'm really competitive. sometimes over competitive. and even though i like to pretend a lot of times im not, im really emotional. and its this combination that made running the thing i stuck with. i played baseball and basketball and soccer and even swam for a little bit before i found running. and i never would have guessed that distance running is where i would end up being most competitive in my life. i dont think there was ever anything more satisfying in my high school career than this time i beat a kid in the last lap of a two mile. it was the inaugural Perry 9/10 meet that like its title implies included only freshmen and sophomores. it was a friday meet that got rain delayed in the middle of it and by the time the two mile rolled around it was like 10:00PM. anyway it was this freshman from hoover, our rival highschool, who ran the whole race in the lead for 9 1/2 laps. i ran most of the race in second/third with my friend nick. on the last lap though i really picked it up and started to catch the kid who led. i honestly dont remember how far in front of me he was but i caught up to him with 200 to go and just ran as hard as i could by him and all the way to the finish. i beat him by 8 seconds to run 10:29. which was a huge pr for me, first time breaking 11 minutes. but what felt so satisfying, is we had someone filming the race and this kid that i passed literally walked across the finish line. i like to think he was demoralized by me that he couldnt finish. it sounds kind of mean, but it felt so good at the time. this kid was one of my high school rivals and is a dick in real anyway so dont feel bad for him. his name is alec hernandez. even sounds like a dick. but winning, and runnign faster than you ever have before and sometimes even just passing someone in a race is so satisfying. i love that feeling. evem back in high school the first time i beat my friend justin as a senior. i spent 4 years being slower than him (by a lot, initially) and the moment i passed him in this one race i can feel the big smile i had on my face. nothing beats it. and as much as i hated these moments, its also really interesting to look back on the times that i didnt do so well and how much it tore me up. how i had invested so much time into something only to end up not doing so well. there are two times i cried after races in my life. both were in college and both were at oberlin! haha. the last time was because i thought it was my last race ever, and i was just overcome with lots of emotions and it was raining anyway and i just didnt care. never forget that moment either. but the other was junior year. sophomore year track was the height of my running career performance wise. i had a really good track season and got to go to conference which was actually the most fun i had ever had at any single track meet. because of that i invested and expected a lot of things from my cross country season. i was never great at cross country but i desired to be so badly. i spent most of that season running in the top 7, but got sick teh week of all ohio and ran pure awfulness. that earned me my way onto the open race of oberlin and i dont think i ever fully recovered from being sick, and my dad was supposed to come watch and he didnt, and a lot of things went poorly and i didnt make conference. but its cool to look back and think that something so silly and trivial and unimportant in the scope of things affected me that much. its so hard to find things that you can genuinely invest in like that. and thats why running is cool, haha. i will hopefully get back to running consistently at some point, and i will probably run some road races and half marathons and probably a real marathon at some point in my life, and as much as i appreciate anyone who gets off their ass to even participate in a marathon you bet im gonna race that thing, because thats who i am. so fitting that today is the longest run i've been on who knows how long.