Personal Narrative: Growing Up As An Athlete

Often many people dwell on their failures and dream about a time where they can go back in time and do things differently. I recall the summer transitioning from junior year to my last year in high school, I aspired to be thin like the models you see on TV or in any of the magazines. I decided to take it upon myself to exercise daily and limit my diet to healthier options. This method however, was taking too long for me, I needed to find a quicker way. My obsession with perfection took over and I began watching my caloric intake too closely. I consumed 500 calories a day and advanced my workout routine. I ran 2 miles in the morning, went home to sleep for a couple of hours and then went to Volleyball practice followed by another run. Eventually, after three months or so I grew so tired and so weak that I had to cut down on my workouts.

Shifting in my heavy metal cleats, I can feel countless sets of eyes trained on me, observing my every move from their hard stadium seats. Normally when I’m on the mound, I have ice in my veins; the stares of the crowd bounce right off. However, this wasn’t a normal day. Instead of standing on the rubber to fire fastballs at opposing batters, I was there to honor two very special ladies and to raise funds and awareness for a cause that hits very close to home, Multiple Sclerosis. During this part of the ceremony, a fellow teammate and I were supposed to present our mothers, who are fighting the disease, with a gift from the team. Unfortunately, this did not occur as smoothly as one would hope. With slick palms, I calmly approached her with

To make the track team I have to have a proper diet and know the differents between carbs and sweets.well it was in my best interest too, I didnt really want to. I just wanted to make yhe team so bad I needed to do whatever is possible. I cut out many foods out of my diet, candy, and lots of frozen meals which I ate a lot of. I knew it will take a lot to get used to.

There are several reasons why I am athletic. The ways I am athletic and stay athletic is through training and playing football, basketball, and baseball. First off, I train to get into shape. I do push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, and many other exercises like that. Also, I practice all the different sports and do different workouts to get better. The first sport that comes around is football. I play quarterback and linebacker and have been very successful. The past two years the teams I have been on haven’t lost a game! Next, is basketball, and it is my favorite sport. I have played it for all my life and still play it today. I play point guard and I like to shoot. During my basketball years, I have made many buzzer-beaters and

I was eating candy, drinking soda all of the time. Rarely did I eat healthy things such as fruits and veggies. In order to be the best and achieve my goals in wrestling I had to change, I had to eat healthy. I began to believe that I could and would do it...and I did. A change came over me when I started to be more healthy, I felt better, was more active and had more fun with family and friends.

Throughout my entire life, I have been an avid golfer. From the moment my parents gave me my first set of clubs when I was five, I have loved golf. I enjoy practicing, playing and as strange as it might sound to someone who does not play golf, I even love to watch golf. To me, I have always been enthralled by the precision necessary to be a consistently good golfer and how just a one degree difference in your swing or on the club can make a dramatic impact on the distance and ball flight of your shot. Over the past couple of years, I have practiced for hours, trying to perfect each individual aspect of my game. When I was ten years old, I started traveling across the country to compete in national tournaments and had

This past week has been a struggle trying to focus on the present, caused by the stress of the future. The big question that determines what environment to live in, concerns me through my interests. I was positive about my decision to play ball through my university years, I was committed to become part of a larger and more challenging team. The question wasn’t really a question because I finally knew what I wanted to do with the next 6 years, do you want a scholarship? Are you committed? Do you know your duties of participating on a university team? Are you sure that you want to play and get an education in the U.S.?

Yards became smaller as country gave way to the edge of town. We were forced to skirt slightly larger groups of zombies by darting through backyards and leaping fences. I was amazed at how easily I was able to conquer these obstacles. The past few months were like boot camp. My muscles had atrophied due to an easy life as a college professor, but a few months of living on the run had turned a once lethargic human being into a first class athlete.

Falling short as an athlete is something that isn't acceptable. Making us as a group push to ack has been something that all through elementary school and middle school I enjoyed doing actually loved. As a highschool freshman this whole track thing really hit me hard. Like literally. The workouts are pretty intense, in meaning there a lot of sprinting endurance based making it hard. I didn't track pre season which really wasn't a help and our endurance for volleyball wasn't even to par then. So I was really coming into track season a blob of mess and fat. But I had a good heart and great intentions. Krumb our coach who also doubles as the boys football coach, which is totally insane by the way trains us like linebackers or something. I

Overall, my nutrition is quality is not terrible. Although I surpass all my intake goals, I might’ve been due to the calorie calculator I used. I was somewhat in a limbo between two levels of exercise so I am not shocked at all. After all, swimmers are known for a large appetite. However, this doesn’t stop that fact that I had double the daily recommended dose of sugar and high consumption of some of the 5 avoidables. In the upcoming weeks, I will try to eat more vegetables instead of empty calorie foods in hopes to see that I feel more energized throughout my

I began to track my weight every week until the start of sophomore year in September. I was amazed at the progress I had made in just two months of exercising and eating right. I lost almost twenty pounds going from 236 lbs. to 217 lbs. After maintaining that weight for the first half of the school year, I then returned to my exercise routine in the spring and began losing more and more. By the end of school I as nearing an even 200 lbs. and by the middle of the summer had dropped to a tremendous 185

Knowing then what I know now, I would have benefited extremely in my training if my knowledge of proper nutrition was established. Good nutritional habits are needed when it comes to playing sports. As I coach that is one of the main things I am going to stress and make sure to educate my athletes on. I want to make sure they can advance their fitness levels by making sure they are getting the proper nutrients needed. It was not until the end of my high school years when I started learning better nutrient habits. Luckily this was due to my brother studying nutrition in college. He helped me learn some basic fundamentals, and with the increased knowledge of nutrition I was able to lose weight, run longer, and build better muscle. Once I was able to take off some weight, tournaments became more fun and less of a

I also noticed that I found myself complaining about my diet a lot. I would find myself starving all day, and then as soon as I would get home I would gorge in all different types of junk food. By expanding more on this problem in my health journal, I concluded that this might be because I am a commuter student. As a commuter student, I scheduled all my classes close together so I could leave the campus at a decent time, go to work, and have time to finish all my homework. I spend the majority of my time in the library and find it inconvenient to have to walk to the HUB every time I am hungry, especially since the breaks between classes are not long enough. If I hadn’t journaled, I probably wouldn’t have noticed these patterns. I would have just shrugged them off, not realizing that they do have a long-term effect on my health.

For the most part, my choices for meals were good, the issue came in when I had snacks around my apartment. Before this project, I have never focused on the nutritional value of the food I eat. I know what foods I should and should not eat, but I never really thought “I should eat a carrot because it is high in nutrients.” First of all, I do not like carrots so I would never eat one voluntarily, mostly I am just trying to eat food that has enough protein so that I’ll be full for a little bit longer. This means that when I chose to eat any of these meals mentioned below I was not thinking if it was high in nutrients, I was thinking whether it sounded good or not.

So what went wrong? Maybe they went too far on the “eat less” spectrum. There’s all sort of things that can go wrong on that side of the spectrum. Low calories can cause the metabolism to slow down by throwing your hormones all out of whack. Then there’s the fallacy that somehow consuming less junk (100 calorie snack packs, anyone?) is somehow better for you. It’s kind of like a pack a day smoker cutting down to a quarter pack. Better, but by no means good.