“If you put your mind to something, you can definitely conquer that goal.”

Ritika Mitra

“I got into running in eighth grade when my P.E. teacher showed me the benefits of running. That’s when I really got into it and decided to try out for cross country and track in high school. I think running is a very rewarding sport. If you work hard and put the effort to run everyday and do the work outs properly, you will see improvement in your times and be able to set a personal record at every race. I started off running three miles a day and I slowly increased that mileage to five or six miles everyday. Apart from running, core is definitely something you have to do as a runner to make your body strong. While running, you’re dying because it’s painful, but after the race is over, you feel runner’s high. You just feel really good like, ‘Oh, I achieved something,’ and you can relate that to life that if you work hard, you will get the reward at the end. During my cross-country tryouts freshman year, I didn’t know what to expect and on the first day, the coach said that we had to do hill repeats on this trail. The first time up I thought, ‘This is fine, I can handle it’; the second time up I thought, ‘Okay, it’s starting to get tiring’; and the third time up, I thought, ‘This is actually pretty hard and painful.’ However, the fact that I stuck with it and didn’t give up taught me a very important life lesson: to never give up and if you put your mind to something, you can definitely conquer that goal.”