Wednesday, January 16, 2019 // The Statement 
7B
Wednesday, January 29, 2020 // The Statement
7B

I

n a past life, I ran. For all four years 
of high school, I was a member of the 
junior varsity cross country team, 
having joined on a mandate from my mom: I 
had to do a sport in high school to keep busy, 
be healthy and stay “socially stimulated.” Ball 
sports were an automatic no for someone like 
me, who’d been hit in the face with a basket-
ball during gym class one too many times, 
and you didn’t have to try out for cross coun-
try. Plus my older cousin Jackie was already 
on the team, so I figured that might give me 
a leg up in the social scene. Cross country it 
was, then. 
This fall, three years after my last cross 
country race, I found myself struggling to 
propel my body down Stadium Boulevard 
in Ann Arbor after I’d vowed to start run-
ning again. My destination was Washtenaw 
Avenue, and as I inched down the sidewalk, 
I finally began to see a stoplight in the dis-
tance. I picked up the pace a little because I 
knew the faster I got to the light, the faster I 
could be done. But when I neared the light, I 
saw that it wasn’t Washtenaw at all. I realized 
I hadn’t even passed the Trader Joe’s yet. I 
still had so much left to run before I could 
rest. Holy shit, I thought, trying to surrepti-
tiously wipe my runny nose, what have I got-
ten myself into? 
I

’ve never thought of myself as an ath-
lete. In elementary school, I danced 
for a few years. I did gymnastics, 
played rec softball and soccer. None of it 
stuck, though, and as the talent of my peers 
increased and mine plateaued, I’d drop each 
sport without much remorse — I preferred 
to explore other interests, like reading nov-
els and writing articles for a weekly news-
paper I distributed at my extended family’s 
Friday night dinners. I still did “athletic” 

things: I rode my 
bike around the 
neighborhood all 
the time, my dad 
taught me how to 
ride a unicycle and 
I learned to love 
hiking and canoe-
ing 
during 
my 
summers at sleep-
away camp. Still, 
I had this percep-
tion of athletes as 
talented, competi-
tive people with 
an intense love for 
physical activity — 
and none of those 
childhood activi-
ties ever made me 
feel like an athlete 
in that sense. 
I

t’s 
hard 
to 
believe 
now that I 
stuck with cross 
country for all four years of high school. 
Most of the memories that linger involve seri-
ous pain and total mental anguish. I couldn’t 
walk for two months sophomore year 
because I’d given myself horrible shin splints 
on both legs. I can also remember the refrain 
that would run through my head every time 
I ran a race: “If you finish this race, you never 
have to run again, ever.” Of course, I would 
always go back to practice the next day.
I recently came across two of my high 
school journals while rooting through the 
drawer of my bedside table. Sure enough, the 
first entry I saw when I opened the purple 
notebook from my senior year confirmed my 
memories.
“I dread going back to school 90% because 
of XC,” I wrote on Aug. 30, 2015, a few days 
before I began my senior year. “I don’t mind 
the other parts of it so much, but UGH I just 
hate cross country and I want to love it ... but 
oy, I can’t.” 
When I read that, I remembered the dread 
I felt just driving by the high school that 
August. I remembered the desire to either 
become a “real” runner or stop having to 
pretend I felt like one. I shuddered under the 
weight of the memories as I closed the diary. 
Then I opened the second journal, this 
one an earlier volume that I filled throughout 
my freshman year. On Sep. 18, 2012, I wrote: 
“I have cross-country every single day after 
school. OH MY GOD, it’s so hard! It’s the best 
kind of hard, though, because I feel so accom-
plished after I run.” And on Nov. 2: “I can’t 
believe the season’s over!! I’m SO glad I did it; 
I made so many amazing friends. I loved XC.”
I was so taken aback after reading those 
entries that I had to lie down on my bedroom 
floor. I couldn’t help but laugh. How in the 
world had I gone from that level of enthu-

siasm freshman year to the pessimism of 
senior year? And why were those final mem-
ories the only ones I remembered? 
I

f nothing else, running gives you a 
lot of time to think, and as I trudged 
down the street five days after begin-
ning to run again, the journal entries kept 
popping into my mind. I thought about how 
I’d felt both grown up and protected when 
the older girls on the cross country team took 
me on a tour of the high school even before 
freshman orientation. I thought about the 
team sleepover we’d had and how cool I’d felt 
just hearing two of the seniors on the team 
talk nonchalantly about having “naked pool 
parties” with their boyfriends. I thought 
about the sense of accomplishment I felt from 
making it up the notoriously awful hill at 
Kensington Metropark. I didn’t run fast that 
first season, but it didn’t matter. I was push-
ing myself. I was growing. I was having fun. 
Thinking about cross country made me 
think about the concept of strength. The 
summer before my sophomore year, I missed 
most of the team’s summer practices because 
I was away at camp, and when I came back 
to practice in the early fall, I was incredibly 
out of shape. The brand new freshmen were 
outrunning me and I couldn’t complete the 
3-mile run without stopping. I remember 
sobbing to my mom about how embarrass-
ing it felt to still be running at the back after 
a full year on the team. I remember the pain 
that rattled through my shins during those 
first few practices of the year, and the shame 
that came from learning it wasn’t even a 
stress fracture, just stupid shin splints, which 
everyone gets. I remember sprints practice 
on the soccer field, watching my teammate 
Ioana limp through her own injury as I sat 
out entirely. Of course, now I understand 
how serious shin splints are and that running 
would have been unsafe for me that season. 
But all I knew then was that Ioana was strong 
enough to push through her injury, and I 
wasn’t. I remember thinking: I must not be a 
runner. I must not be an athlete. 
L

abeling myself in any way made 
me feel vulnerable as a kid. To call 
myself an athlete was to tell the 
world I thought of myself as a person with 
certain talents and passions. What if I called 
myself a runner but people saw me running in 
the back of the pack? What if I called myself 
a writer but people didn’t like my stories? I 
worried so much about what other people 
would think of my labels that I never thought 
to define the terms for myself. I wonder now 
if it would have mattered that I didn’t con-
sider myself a runner if others had. Which is 
more important: what others think of me, or 
how I think of myself? Can I even separate 
those perceptions from one another? 
When I applied to colleges my senior 
year of high school, I thought for a long time 
about what I should write in my application 
essays. Although I didn’t decide I wanted to 

be a writer until my sophomore year of col-
lege, there must have been some deep-seated 
desire in me to go down that path, because I 
remember hesitating to write about my love 
for writing in my essays. What would hap-
pen, I’d fret, if I wrote that I wanted to be a 
writer, but the admissions counselor didn’t 
think I had any writing talent? I’d be bearing 
my whole soul right there on the page, and 
the reader would have the authority to decide 
my fate. It was too risky. I wrote about other 
topics instead. 
I’m no longer afraid to call myself a writer, 
but the confidence in that label didn’t take 
hold until I became the Editor in Chief of my 
college newspaper. Even as a staff reporter, 
I still felt like I only dabbled in writing, and 
that anyone who was a “real” writer would 
laugh if they knew I was calling myself one, 
too. 
Perhaps this preoccupation with how oth-
ers perceive our labels impacted my view of 
my cross country experience. It was accept-
able, expected even, to be a less talented 
runner freshman year. It wasn’t as common 
to still be running in JV races as a senior. 
Everyone got injured at one point or another, 
but not everyone decided to sit out for three-
quarters of the season because of shin splints. 
Maybe the contempt I expressed in my senior 
year diary and the unhappy memories that 
remain of the experience stemmed from a 
subconscious effort to create cognitive disso-
nance between myself and the sport. Maybe I 
was trying to signal to the outside world that 
I didn’t care if I was a slow runner, because 
I didn’t enjoy running at all. I didn’t feel like 
I deserved the running label, so I shunned 
the sport altogether. Would I have gone on 
to love running if I hadn’t been so afraid of 
labels? 
I think about what would have happened 
if I’d shied away from writing, too. I never 
would have joined The Michigan Daily. I 
never would have become Editor in Chief. 
My whole identity would be different. 
Though I’ve started running again, I’m 
still not sure if I’ll ever be able to call myself 
a runner — at least not with the same con-
fidence I have in calling myself a writer. I’d 
like to say I’ve matured beyond the point of 
caring about how others viewed me, but part 
of me still thinks I’d feel like an imposter if I 
claimed the label. I have to wonder, though 
— does it even matter? I’m running again and 
feeling good about it. This time I’m not going 
to let a label — or lack thereof — dictate how I 
feel about the sport as a whole. For now, you 
can catch me trudging down Stadium Bou-
levard. I’ll have a better sense of where my 
landmarks are this time.

Maya Goldman is the former Editor in Chief 
of The Michigan Daily and can be reached at 
mayagold@umich.edu.

On finding labels, and maybe myself

ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE 

BY MAYA GOLDMAN, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR

