College Admissions Essay: Everyone Will Face Challenges

People will face challenges everyday in their lives. For some these challenges may be minor and for others they may be major. The way they handle those challenges can and may impact their lives forever. I have come to realize that there is one thing in our lives that everybody can rely on to help them get through these challenges and that is optimism! I know this because it has worked for me! The area in my life where optimism has helped me the most has been in my athletic career while participating in Cross Country

Cross country is a mental sport. I have been told by my coaches that if you want to win a race, you must win it mentally. This is because if you don't believe you can do something, it is most likely not going to happen! This is

Their encouragement helped me to push through many painful and rough practices. I always tried to give them the same encouragement whenever I could. Keeping my teammates and myself mentally positive made some of the most brutal workouts a lot more enjoyable! The optimism that surrounded me at our practices helped me to reach new goals as a runner that I know I definitely could not have reached on my own. Our team's' optimism also allowed us to able to be competitive even though we were a very small team. Many of our competing teams had many more team members, but they were not as supportive of their teammates. Many of these team's individual goals far superseded their team goals. Our Cross Country team always worked as a cohesive team that would run together as a tight pack. We would strategize which of the competing runners we would pass along the course. We also made sure no one ever got discouraged and always gave each other words of encouragement to keep us motivated. These single words of encouragement have a huge impact when running in Completions. During that final stretch of the run, as you are spent and exhausted, just one single encouraging word can give you all the energy you need to pass your competitors at the finish