The roller coaster

By: Sara Alonso

It's been more or less two years since I discovered this new me, myself as an athlete. Until then I had practiced other sports but I did not feel identified with them. Now if someone asks me, who are you? I answer that I am an athlete, the kind of person who wakes up every morning with a goal in the mind, doesn´t mind if it is the next training or a competition.

Many people does´t understand how someone could enjoy running. One of the most repeated questions I heard during this two years are: Do not you get tired? Do not you suffer? Do you really have fun? Of course I get tired, but the greater that fatigue and the suffering, the greater the reward. We are a little masochists, we must admit that we like suffering... But because we have clear what we want to achieve.

Even so, this is the life that I have chosen. It is like living on a roller coaster, there are days that make you think about leaving everything, results do not arrive, trainings are hard, your feelings do not help... And they make you think why you are suffering when you could be hanging out with your friends. But there are also days that where you feel as excited as when you are on the top of a roller coaster, you think you can beat anyone, improve all your pbs. You feel as the rider of the roller coaster, you are the one in control.

It is a very hard sport, where you can´t relax too much and where you have to train hard every day, leaving your soul in every training. Also at my age many weekends when your friends go out partying, you have to go home because the next day you have a competition. They do not sleep because they are partying, and don´t sleep neither because you are too nervous. The next day they will wake up exhausted after the party, but you will be even more exhausted at the end of the race. But 100 times happier for what you just did. I think that that satisfaction after all the sacrifice is almost impossible to feel it in another way. And if someone knows a way please tell me how.

Even so, although the road has many obstacles, it also has many gifts, as the relationships that are created with your coach and with your teammates or all the friendships that are created in each competition. Because even if they say that athletics are an individual sport, more and stronger relantionships are generated than in other sports. If I compare track and field with football for example (the sport I practised before running), in a track I can´t hear people yelling to the referee, coaches shouting between each other or your rivals kicking  trying to stop you as it happens in football. There is no race where at the end once you arrive you "rival" is not waiting to congratulate and help you.