Track (part uno)

Track

As many of you know, I run track. I enjoy running track. Not only do I get to get into shape, but I can wear short shorts! Just kidding… But anyway let me tell you a little about this sport.
Track is different than most sports that we play today. There are many cool things about track. Here are just a few of the many that are out there.

Track can be run against yourself. This is very different than Soccer, baseball, basketball, football, lacrosse, polo, or any other sport today. In most sports you have to go up against someone else. In order for your team to be good, they need to beat another team. Track you can do it either way. There are people running next to you on the track that you can try to beat, but you can also run against your self or in other words run against time. You can try to beat yourself and get faster every time you run it. If you don’t think you would be able to push yourself hard enough there are many examples of people that have pushed themselves very hard. Take my sister for example. Here is a little background- My sister is a senior in high school, she has a 4.0, she has received all sorts of rewards and stuff for being a great student, and she runs cross country, indoor track, and track. So basically she has 3 weeks of the year that she doesn’t run (she also received academic all state in cross country and has lettered every year in every sport). When she started running in 9th grade she stunk. Her quarter mile time was about 95 seconds (for you that don’t know about track that is pretty slow). She has trained so hard that she was able to run it in 60.25 seconds today (it was rainy and cold- not a good day to run- a slow day). That in its self is pretty amazing but what happened in between her 9th and 12th grade years is huge. After 9th grade was over and cross country was starting she started to get shin splints. Shin splints are a very painful condition that happens when the muscle in your shins starts pulling away from your bones. She talked to some of her friends who had slight and average running pains in their legs and she thought she was being a baby about the pain. So she tried to ignore the pain and didn’t tell anyone else about it. So about when track started she finally gave in to the pain and told her coaches and our parents. Both of them flipped out when she told them about her condition. Her coaches knew about stuff like this because they had been around it a lot. My Dad is a doctor and he knew what it was also and he explained it to my mom. They got her a set of compression sleeves to try to help her. Compression sleeves are like long, tight socks that don’t have the area that covers the feet. These helped, but only a little. If she had gotten these sooner they may have stop the condition from getting worse. Her legs just kept on hurting more and more until finally she couldn’t take it any more. She went in to she a doctor specialized in the field where here pain was. They did all kinds of test to prove what they thought she might have. They took x-rays. They did an MRI. They inserted a lot of radio active stuff into her so they could see where blood was going, and what it was trying to heal. It turned out that she had stress fractures in her legs. This means that when she was running that the muscles in her legs were getting too beat up so that they would transfer some of the impact of each step onto her bones. Bones aren’t meant to have that kind of pressure. So in a way she started to shrink. Her bones were compressing and that caused a spider web of cracks to go through out her middle shins.

In a nutshell, she ran so hard that she broke her legs.

The docs put a cast on one leg and put her in a wheel chair. After she said that being in the wheel chair was harder for her to be in than all the pain that she received through out the entire time. She hated it when someone would try to push her. She had to do it herself.
When you are put in a cast aren’t you usually supposed to get better? The problem was that her legs were hurting still, especially the one in the cast. She went back into the doctors and they did more weird tests and found out that she had a special condition. The muscles in her leg were swelling up because she couldn’t move them. So by putting her in the cast, they made her leg get worse than better. They took the cast off but kept her in the wheelchair (duh). After about 3 months she finally got out of that dreaded contraption and was able to walk. The next week she was running again. Her legs still hurt but she says that she won’t be able to run in collage either way so why not run now? So even though her legs hurt and even though she making the pain worse, she chooses to run. She is my hero. It that a good example or what? So there you have it, there is definitely enough completion against yourself in track. So now I can’t remember what I was talking about so I guess I’ll move on.