When people think of difficult sports, they often think of the most physically demanding, injury-prone sports that get national media coverage like football, boxing or soccer. In sports, we often prioritize physical violence and entertainment value, two factors that go hand in hand. What we don’t always consider is the psychological aspect of sports; the part that really matters when it comes to exercising.
I think most people can agree that running is not particularly fun. It’s physically and mentally exhausting, unrewarding, somewhat boring and just downright hard. I find that most people who say they enjoy distance running usually enjoy it for reasons unrelated to the running itself. Picture the pure joy you feel when you run. Now, picture it in 32 degrees.
I’m not saying there aren’t good reasons to do winter track; if there weren’t, people wouldn’t do it. What I’m saying is that the vast majority of students at WJ would never choose to participate in winter track solely for the experience of running.
Sports in general are great because they allow people to be part of something bigger than themselves. Sports also allow people to form bonds through pain and the WJ winter track team is certainly no exception in this category. Many runners who participate in winter track have bonded with their friends on the team and would rather stick with the sport rather than quit because of the connections they have. Others feel that they should participate in track to buff up their college resumes. However, I reaffirm that if not for the bonds that winter track, and all sports in general, allow athletes to form, almost nobody would choose to run winter track.
Winter track, just like any other WJ sport, is an enormous time commitment. Practice is every day starting at 3 p.m. and lasting two to three hours right after school. This means you have to stay up way too late the night before, wake up way too early the morning after, bomb your math test and then run 7 miles.
My personal favorite memory of winter track was the day coming back from a snowstorm when the track was covered in snow. We ran suicides in the bus loop every day for a week for about two to three hours after school. That was pretty much around the time I realized whatever benefit I was getting out of this sport was not worth the anguish I was receiving.
This leads us to the question: why do people actually participate in winter track? Maybe students feel the need to participate in a sport because everyone else is already playing one. Maybe it’s to be a remotely competitive candidate in college admissions nowadays since students are encouraged to have at least one extracurricular to write about. Maybe it’s because athletes who play spring sports want to stay in shape for the upcoming season. I think the most likely answer is that everyone has their own separate reason for joining winter track and nobody’s situation is the same. However, it’s safe to say that students don’t do track out of the pure giddy joy they receive from doing sprint workouts in freezing cold temperatures.
