Personal Narrative-Running Blog

On March 19, I ran my 3rd Los Angeles marathon- a running event that is becoming an annual affair that me and my wife participates, which started 3 years ago when she signed me up to run my first marathon exactly one month before the event (she did her first the year prior).

43 degrees Fahrenheit and realizing I had forgotten my arm warmers and iPod, I recognized the 26.2 miles ahead of me would require some grit. Yet before the starting pistol fired and the recording of Frank Sinatra singing “New York, New York” played, I knew all the preparation done in the months and weeks prior had primed me for a successful finish. There is a mantra in distance running, “the hay is in the barn,” to affirm that all of the training and miles logged up until race day will lead you to success. And it is this mantra which has guided my preparation for a career as a physician assistant.

Every runner wore a bib number with the time they start on it. As I was running people were passing me who had started after me, and I kept thinking I was going too slow and that I shouldn’t be taking this long to complete it. Through words of encouragement from my mom and decipline mentras from myself I finished the race, I crosses the fanish line and the feeling of triumph as I crossed it was something I’ll never forget.

My throat was parched instantly. Knowing that I had to stay with Shelby. Repetitively telling myself that I could do it, I have to. Once I arrived at the mile mark before I knew it. I was searching all over but I could not see Shelby. Second guessing that she was ahead of me, I worked even harder. The wind was strong and the air was dirty. For a minute I was thinking that I could not do it; however, I changed that thought quickly after I saw the finish line. Pushing the hardest I had ever pushed. Noticing that I had made it, I placed 81st in

In every run i grow. I grow as a person, my faith grows, my mind grows, and my spirit grows a little more with each step. One day I WILL. I WILL run a marathon. 26.2 Seems out of reach, but i know it's not, because i run.

Running a marathon at only 17 years old taught me that the strongest supplements a person needs are determination and motivation. The largest development of mindset and the confirmation of my future career came from when I chose to vicariously run 26.2 miles for the person who inspires me the most; my mother. When I was younger, my mother ran the Chicago Marathon twice. After her diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis in 2013, she still continued to attempt to run and walk despite her immense pain. She eventually was unable to run, until I worked with her to build strength for jogging. She then started walking and jogging as much as possible. Inspired by her, I decided to run the Towpath Full Marathon in October of 2015, after six months of training.

As I was reading through the feedback I received on the first major paper I have written in over four years, I happened to think of something I read on a pink notebook in Walmart last night. “Good feedback is the key to improvement.” When I saw the small errors I missed, I knew it was time to start making some healthy adjustments to my writing. Although I have a terrible habit of using contractions and comma splices, I would like to expand my vocabulary and make my writing stronger, be able to incorporate more transitional statements, and I would like to become more comfortable with comma usage.

This was my fourth year in a row participating and running the Killington Beast on both Saturday & Sunday. My right knee has been so bad this summer that I wasn’t intending to go to Killington this year, but the knee started feeling a little better and I got the OCR itch again and had to go do it!

I was reading through the feedback I received on the first major paper I have written in over four years, I happened to think of something I read on a pink notebook in Walmart last night. “Good feedback is the key to improvement.” When I saw the errors I missed, I knew it was time to start making some healthy adjustments to my writing. Although I have a terrible habit of using contractions and comma splices, I would like to expand my vocabulary and formulate my writing to become stronger, be able to incorporate transitional statements, and I would like to become comfortable with comma usage.

In spite of the gloomy weather, runners and volunteers alike put their best foot forward, offering many positive remarks. “I never thought I could run a 100k,” comments Lea Becker, who finished 19th place in the 100k, “A year ago, I was running

In high school, distance running has improved not only my physical strength but also my mental toughness, and it has benefited various aspects of my life. By running seven miles per day consistently, I learned to persevere regardless of the difficulties and setbacks, and perseverance also enabled me to accomplish boring and complicated tasks such as spending hours finding and fixing one single unnoticeable bug in my program. Moreover, I became accustomed to challenging myself after I pushed my limits by ordering my legs to move in great pain during every race; accordingly, I would proactively seek academic challenges by taking courses at which I am relatively weak. As for the longest run, my life, I will keep running forward with the same spirit, never stopping self-improvement. Therefore, I will keep distance running in college.

February 4, 2007 was a day of celebration for my whole family. That day my family gathered around in the living room and cheered on the Colts to victory in the Super Bowl. This day was the anticipated highpoint of my school conversations for the past week. My dad was in his leather chair drinking his favorite Raspberry Snapple Tea. My mom, siblings and I were crowded around on leather couches in our living room. We were all close in age. I was ten years old in fourth grade, my sister was eleven in fifth grade, and my brother was thirteen in sixth grade. I didn’t understand football that much as a fourth grader, but I always looked forward to the Super Bowl commercials. I still remember one of the commercials that affected me the most. In the

As a child, I had a passion for read and write. I was very proud of my first poem project that displayed a smiling sun in the corner of the page. Books were a way for me to be someone else to be somewhere else. Lucky for me Harry Potter was all the rage during my elementary school discussions. At that time I caught the writing bug and would write anything that would come to mind. Characters and stories came to me at all times of the day. However, around age 14 I could no longer write a word I wrote interesting outside of school assignments. I became a teenager and with that I lost my creativity. I start something and it ends up in as a paper ball in the trash. I put the pen to the paper and I can’t get anything out. So here I am searching

Teammates eagerly awaited to be tagged so they could start the 3.1 mile run. Individual competitors stopped to park bikes, removed their equipment and started the last leg of their journey. Some struggling more than others, they pushed through their weakened and shaking legs.

For a long time my mom was involved in agriculture and trucking. She was self-employed, but over the past few years she has wanted to seek out other opportunities. She wanted to create a spray tan company, but did not have a website or marketing. Having had experience with computers, I was readily willing to help. I was able to help her create a website, a phone app, and business cards, so she was able to begin this pursuit. The business was off to a slow start, until we decided that the best way for people to hear about her business was to go to hotels and leave business cards and flyers. This creative approach has led to numerous opportunities and hopefully the business will continue to do well. From this, I learned the essentials of being