The worst time in my life was when I got sick last year in freshmen year. For context I had been running top of the nation times as a 8th grader for middle school and I run about seven miles a day. Thing is I wasn’t when I got into high school because I got sick with a illness in August that I couldn’t identify till December and I was sick in bed for the entire time. I could barely walk to the living room and I had constant pounding headaches. I was absolutely miserably and I thought about suicide almost constantly. I pretty much cried myself to sleep every night. Even when we went to the doctor they couldn’t figure anything out during this period of time I had a blood tests close to once a week, I had two MRI’s, and we went to one of the best neurologists or what ever in the country. All that and nothing the blood work came back with nothing the MRI showed nothing, and the the damn neurologist gave me antidepressants and said it was because of some teenage hormones or something. After all of that there was two more months of pain the antidepressants did nothing absolutely nothing. I probably would have killed myself a week or two later if my mom’s friends haven’t reached out to her. Dr. R who a infectious disease doctor saw my moms post on Facebook and contacted her. A day later we were in his office he did some tests on me and said “you probably have ehrlichiosis that’s why the blood tests didn’t show anything.” (ehrlichiosis is basically Lyme disease but rarer and a lot harder to find it’s the swelling of the brain membrane so it doesn’t show up on MRI’s I think) He gives me a medication and two weeks later I was better no more headaches no more weakness I was back.

However the story doesn’t end there remember how I said I was sick from August to December yeah that was five months of training I missed out on. So by the time i got better I had lost all of my base I couldn’t run a mile with out grasping for breath. So some people in this situation would have quit running but not me I just started to train again even though my mother told me to quit and focus on school. So every day i would run after school just working up my base little by little day by day. It’s -9f outside and it’s snowing who cares the cold hasn’t ever bothered me. And by the time track came around in the spring I had gotten back down to about 75% of my ability was. So the first races comes around and I’m facing all the fellow freshmen I had faced at state the year before. Some of these people are guys who were I’d say better than me in middle school and were almost certainly better than me now. I get to the first race and I do well.

I win it by 15 meters and break my PR. Physical limits, never heard of them. Anyways the season goes on and I get better and better breaking my schools record along the way.In the last race I get a 4:40 and miss out on state by 4 places and about 16 seconds. But that doesn’t matter because for freshmen I was still top 10 in state. So that’s the story of how I almost died and came back to become the best runner in my schools history. So just think if a kid like me can do this imagine what you can do.