My name is Annie Busch and I am a Senior at Cox High school. All four years that I have been at Cox I have run Cross Country, Indoor Track, and Outdoor Track. The summer before my junior year, I decided I wanted to be “fast”. I wanted to improve myself so that I could break my goal 5K time for cross country. To do this, I worked hard to put in all effort towards running. This was easy because I had the time to do so in the summer. Through the cross country season, school eventually started and added stress to my race mentality, but in the end I was racing well. Then indoor track hit, and I ran my fastest mile yet: a 5:37. This was absolutely amazing for me, and I was super excited, but from that point forward I ran slower and slower. School made me anxious and procrastination kept me up all night doing last minute homework. I started to think of track meets as something I had to get through to be able to focus on the rest of the week. I gave up caring. That extremely relaxed and careless mindset was supposed to make me less nervous and more focused on my running, but it only did the opposite.

This year when the Indoor Track season started, I decided to pay attention to how I was mentally approaching meets. I used to fixate on how I would feel after running: either upset and in pain or excited and inspired. I decided to think of track meets as a challenge that I would be able to overcome. I told myself to meet the challenge and conquer it, and to be in the moment. I had some help along the way, but I learned how to manage my mindset when something stressful was about to happen and not overthink the process. Everyone has different stressors in their lives. It’s the approach they take that can define the outcome. – senior Annie Busch