I am currently a senior, who would be in their final track season, but corona virus has that changed. Now I catch myself festering over my devastating cross country season, which I was looking forward to rebounding from.
During my summer, I trained very hard and was confident that I would have a breakthrough cross country season. However, towards the end of the summer I started to feel pain in my knee, which turned out to be patellar tendinitis. I was too motivated to stop, I wanted to be one of the top runners in AZ. After another couple of weeks of exhausting and painful training, I started to feel pain in my feet that felt like stress fractures, but turned out to be tendinopathy. I still chose to grind through, as our first race was fast approaching. When the first race arrived, I remember feeling grinded down, and my knee and my foot were still hurting despite my prehab efforts. The race was “Woodbridge”, a notoriously fast meet, and I was to be in the elite section. Before the meet, I had been trying to manage my micro emotions and negative thoughts the best I could. When the race began, and when we were only half a mile into the race, I found that I was once again compensating, exhausted, and could not keep up with the top runner’s blistering pace. Long story short, I finished fourth to last with a time of 16:47 in a meet where I should have gone below 15 minutes. Me and another teammate caused the team to place 20th. I felt extremely guilty, and I felt a lot of shame. I didn’t feel worthy of being a varsity runner anymore. I went to see a doctor, who recommended that I take 4 weeks off running. I decided to take the 4 weeks off, because I wanted my injury heal. But there was a deeper more concerning reason as to why I took the time off. I was still filled with shame and regret for letting my team down, and I truly did not believe I was worthy. The season from here on out consisted of watching my teammates succeed and win state without me. Not being on the state team was another thing that crushed me. For the last three years, I’d been grinding so that I could reach the state level, but I didn’t get that chance. I was looming forward to a comeback season, but that’s no longer happening as all of our meets were cancelled.
Has anybody dealt with a performance as devastating as mine? Pure humiliation, as my team and school were relying on me to perform. For a while, I was suffering from depression. Is it normal to be this affected by the incident? Is it possible to rebound from such a massive failure? Did my attitude/performance last fall reflect on my mental strength/toughness? As cheesy as it may sound, I’m looking for advice from someone who was in a similar position, who can offer advice on how to bounce back from this emotionally, mentally, and physically. I’m looking to try to walk on to a college team next year. Any advice would be appreciated