10/03/2025
Here I sit, fighting the battle of my mind. The fight has gotten easier, but still exists. At 4:30 a.m., when I lace up my running shoes, my mind wants to wander, to clean, to fuss, to stay safe in my warm chair where I write. Still, I run. Around mile one, my knee reminds me of the eight surgeries it has endured. A sharp pain surges through my body, telling me to quit, the bone-on-bone contact from years of meniscus tears and failed repairs. I tell my knee it doesn’t hurt, and it stops.
I spent most of my senior year in a wheelchair, healing from what was supposed to be the final fix. Four years later, with no hard exercise in between, I trained for a marathon, only to undo it all two days before the race. I had trained too hard to quit, so I boarded the plane, met my friends, and ran. By the finish, my knee was bone on bone, meniscus completely torn out.
That day I learned the truth: the injury was as much in my head as in my knee. Mind over matter. My body would do what my mind believed it could. I finished that marathon. Then came my eighth surgery, along with a doctor’s promise I’d never run again.
So every day I want to skip a run, I remember, I’m not supposed to be doing this. And that’s exactly why I do. Each morning, I test the limits I was told I had, proving to myself that I am limitless. My body will do what my mind commands.
