Muserology Cafe

Everything We Had (March 2008)

by Isa Q., age 17,

When we face failure, we hope to handle it with grace. But that is often easier said than done. After investing time and effort into something, it can be very hard to accept that things have not turned out the way we hoped.

I run cross country. In a cross-country meet, each school has a team of seven runners who race on a three-mile (five-kilometer) course. The goal is to have the combined finishing places of the team be as low as possible. The finishing places of the runners are added up (1 for first place, 2 for second place, and so on), and the team with the lowest number wins. Every member of the team is needed to win a race.

Last fall, my team set a goal for itself. We wanted to win a trophy, to place in the top three, at the state meet. Our school had not won a trophy in years. But we were hopeful. We spent our entire summer and fall training with this single goal in mind. We were convinced that if we won a trophy, all of our hard work would be justified. If we did not--well, we didn't like to think about that. 

And so, one cool September morning, I lined up next to my teammates at the starting line of the state cross-country meet. It had been a struggle to get this far, but we hoped that this moment, this race, this 16 minutes of pain, would make it all worthwhile. We lined up, the gun went off, and almost immediately things fell apart. 

Hundreds of people surged forward from the starting line, and we were caught in the crowd. Four hundred meters into the race, I saw that my teammate Jacob and I were running next to our top guy, Brett. Although we were the second- and third-fastest runners, Brett was much faster. He should have been up front with the leaders, not stuck in the middle of the pack like we were. He was never near us this far into the race. Something was wrong. 

I felt my heart, already pounding from the fast start, beat even faster. I almost panicked. But I held myself together and yelled at Brett to move up. He looked at me, as if in a daze, and then started to pick it up hesitantly.

I put that out of my head and focused on myself. There was nothing I could do except run fast. But it hurt. If I had not been next to Jacob, I would have slowed down. We were able to support each other, taking over control of the pace and pushing it when the other lost strength. 

At a mile and a half in, I realized something else that made my stomach sink: We were alone. Usually there were two other teammates running right next to us, but they were nowhere to be seen. In every other race, we had all run together; it was what made us so successful. But now we were strung out along the course. Our plan was unraveling.

I tried to stay calm. I focused on giving everything I had, regardless of what was happening around me. I knew that I was going fast, faster than I had ever run before. With three-quarters of a mile to go, I heard my coach shout out, "Fifty-six." My place. I was stunned. I was supposed to be in the thirties or lower. I shook my head and pushed forward to the finish line.

The state meet was the fastest one in decades. I ran a massive personal record that would have gotten me around twenty-fifth place in previous years. I ran as well as I could. But things did not turn out as we hoped. We came in seventh place.

I couldn't believe it; none of us could. I remember standing next to a tree, stunned, for what seemed like an eternity. Brett and some others cried. Everyone was apologizing to each other. No one really understood what had happened. We tried to come up with reasons for our poor performance, but no one could think of a convincing explanation. It just hadn't happened. 

The long bus ride home was filled with silence. I remember someone telling me that he would never run again. We felt like failures.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about that day--what went wrong, what could have been done. But most of all, I come back to one question: Knowing that I would come up short, was it worth all the work, all the time spent, the weekends training instead of socializing, all the days I woke before the sun was up to get in some extra miles? Was it worth it?

For a while, it seemed like it was not. But now that I've gotten over the shock of defeat, I've realized something. Despite all the sacrifices I made, I enjoyed myself more during those months of training than I ever have. Ultimately, how we placed in the race did not matter. What mattered were the friendships we developed and the emotions and trials that we went through together. I am certain that I will remember these things for much longer than I would have remembered receiving a trophy. 

We promised to give everything we had, and we did. We promised to support each other, and we did. In that sense, we did not fail at all.