Coach.

every saturday before the actual season starts, our cross country team runs the hills of papago park by asu stadium. we start at 5am. it's hot, hard to believe it could literally be a 100 degrees by 5am, but i can stand as a witness, because it most certainly does. many people fall and cut up their knees. some people throw up because of dehydration. others struggle to reach the peak of the hill only to be told to do it again, and again.

what i'm trying to get at is...it's hard.

it's extremely hard.

you can tell a lot of a runner by how good they are at hills.

this saturday, at papago, i hit a wall. my legs literally felt like they weighed 4oolbs. i could barely make it up the hill without having a complete asthma attack afterwards. i was toward the end of the group and was seriously so embarrassed because of how bad i was struggling.

my coach pulled me aside after the workout and made me look at him directly in the eyes and then said,

"you have hard weeks to make sure you have better ones. the hard ones are what count the most."

immediately i started crying. my coach has never given up on me and i have the hardest time understanding why. but that's what makes him such a good coach, because he genuinely cares about me. he made sure that i knew he wasn't going to give up on me and then made sure that i wasn't giving up on myself. coach alexander has built me up in so many ways, i can't even name half of them. my coach is better than yours.

{A}