Mama Kitty's Back, This Time With a New PR.

During my life I have been faced many times with the daunting task of convincing others I am good enough – to get jobs, to receive scholarships, to keep friendships, to run. I’ve promised future achievements and boasted of success in my past, but this demand to ‘sell yourself’ has always been a particularly difficult concept for me to grasp. Unless of course there is the opportunity for sarcasm, then all of a sudden I am the world’s greatest.

As a child I was told to be modest and fair. “Don’t be conceited, too vain or too proud,” my dad would say. “Be good at what you do, but do it humbly.” As an impressionable child, this advice was well received. But now, with “an elite athlete” being my ambiguous profession, people come to expect a little bit more ‘show pony’ from you.

There is one major problem with this though…

 I could never be a show pony.

A show kitty maybe, but never a show pony.

Although this sounds like a frivolous comment, it really made me think about what things in my life I am most proud of. But lets be honest, anybody that knows me knows that I’ve had far too many triumphs for me to list in just one blog post. So instead I will share with you the story of “The Battle of the 1500m Barrier”, staring Four Minutes and Twenty Seconds.

In March 2005, I ran 4.20.30 in the 1500m at the Sydney Track Classic. I was 15 years old. Before last weekend at UVA, that race in Sydney was the second fastest 1500m I had ever run (the fastest was in 2010 in 4.19.17 – a one time pathetic taste of what it might be like to run under 4.20).

For eight years I had been stuck. Literally, stuck between a two second span of 4.20.1 and 4.21.9. Whether I was tired, excited, anxious, confident, scared, sick, under-trained, or over-trained I would somehow find a way to produce the same result.

This weekend I finally ended this agony - Four minutes. Thirteen seconds. Bout. Bloody. Time.  I ran a second faster for almost every year I had been stuck, and the first thing I felt when I heard my time was relief. For a brief second I thought that moment couldn’t get any better, until I looked up in the sky and saw a double rainbow, and heard Taylor Swift feeling 22 through the speakers of the stadium.

The ups and downs of being an athlete can be ruthless. Deciding to continue to pursue this dream beyond college and putting off a “real job” only makes things more complicated, producing more and more situations for me to explain my worthiness. We can feel pressured to impress in fear of being swept aside by those who are naturally arrogant and egotistical. Nonetheless, I will continue to resist this pressure, and just do my best to let my results do all the talking.

Besides, real kitties don’t talk smack… they just purr.

Meow.