My official last post about the Holidays

This will be the last post I will write about the holidays, because they are almost over. Christmas was yesterday and the only holiday left this winter is New Years. The Holidays coming to an end is sad, but also kind of good. The holidays are really fun and no one really wants to go back to school yet, but they are also stressful. I spent the holidays a lot differently this year than I have in the past.

 

Every year for as long as I can remember, my family and I go to my relative’s (not quite sure how he is related to me) Girl Scout camp. We eat turkey, talk, and walk around the camp attempting to burn off all the calories we had just consumed. This year my grandpa was in the hospital, because he had been falling a lot and they found excess water in his brain, so my grandparents wouldn’t be doing anything for thanksgiving and we decided not to go to the Girl Scout camp. Instead we went to my Uncles house. We had always spent Thanksgiving with my dad’s side of the family, but this year we were going to my mom’s side. It was nice to go visit them for a change, but it was also kind of a hassle. They really didn’t know what they were doing and we didn’t eat until 2 o’clock. They also have a super hyper dog that annoys the crap out of me and we spent most of the time sitting around or listening to stories that we had heard hundreds of times. Even though it could have been better, I did enjoy hanging out with my mom’s side of the family and I was glad we got to visit them.

 

                Christmas was also very different this year. My mom’s side still came down on Christmas Eve and it was a lot of fun, but instead of going to my paternal grandmother’s house on Christmas Day, we spent most of the day in the hospital. We celebrated Christmas on my dad’s side on Saturday, because it worked better for most people and it was really nice, I don’t see my cousins very often. We didn’t have any plans on Christmas day, so we decided to see my dad’s best friend and a very good family friend who was in the hospital. After having a kidney stone removed, he became really sick and could hardly breathe and was diagnosed with pneumonia. He has been in the hospital for a week and at one point was doing really bad. He is getting a little better though, and we ended up spending hours at the hospital with him and his family. One of his daughters came home with my family that night and went sledding with my sister. She came home limping and later went to the hospital and found out she fractured her ankle. So I spent most of my Christmas in the hospital, which actually turned out to be okay and reminded me how lucky I was.

                This year for New Year’s Eve we are going to Memphis to watch the Liberty Bowl!!!!!! I am extremely excited, but I will miss going to a hotel with family friends like we have done in the past.

The holidays were a lot different for me this year, but they ended up being equally as good. Although I am sad that all the holiday fun is ending, it is also quite relaxing. Hopefully I will be able to spend more time running now that the holidays are ending. :)

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The True Meaning of Christmas

There is twelve more days until the best day of the year! CHRISTMAS! Christmas is my favorite holiday, family, food, presents, but I find myself having a hard time remembering what Christmas is all about. Christmas is all about Jesus, which in a materialistic world where everything is about who has the best clothes or the newest technology, it’s really hard to focus on the real meaning of Christmas.

 

Presents are still an important part of Christmas, but it’s not about what you get, it’s about being grateful and giving, like Jesus was grateful and giving. Everyone makes a big deal about what they are getting for Christmas (including me) and nobody really thinks about what it means to give. My sister has a huge list of very specific gifts she wants and she is constantly reminding and begging my mom for the gifts. I try to tell her to stop it, but she gives me glare that says “you’re stupid” and she tells me, in a creative way to shut up. So I drop it and leave her alone to beg, and I occasionally find myself begging to and thinking too much about the presents. Presents are an exciting part of Christmas, but if it is the only thing you care about then you are missing all the other great things about Christmas and all the wonders Jesus gave us.

 

Not taking things for granted is also very important during the holiday season. Instead of focusing on not getting that IPod 5, like all of your friends be grateful that you even get presents and that you have someone who gives them to you. There are plenty of people who don’t get any gifts for Christmas (and not because they’re Jewish) or have families that would even give them gifts. It is important to be thankful like Jesus, who died on the cross for us and suffered so much, yet never complained or even cared about how hard his life was. So every time you feel pity for yourself, because you didn’t get the things that you wanted, just think of all the good things that you have and be grateful for them.

 

Presents can be great, but it can also cause people to be ungrateful. Not getting what you want for Christmas should not be a big deal and people should focus more on family and Jesus then getting everything they want for Christmas, but every one occasionally finds themselves thinking about presents or being ungrateful for what they have. Try to focus more on the real meaning of Christmas this year.

 

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Just Keep Running

As the days get colder my miles are getting shorter. I am finding it hard to get up off the couch and run and I am finding it hard to not turn around after a mile of running. I don’t know how much I should be running; all I know is that I haven’t been running nearly as much as I did for cross country.

I am having a really hard time breathing in the cold air and after a couple of miles my lungs are burning, my body feels weak and I am ready to turn around and head home. I know I should try and push myself more, but I am finding it really hard to get motivation. I have so many goals set in mind, which would normally be very motivating, but once I step out the door all I can think about is how cold it is. Winter also means that it gets darker a lot earlier. Between the freezing cold weather and the fact that I can’t run in the dark, I am really struggling to find time and motivation to run. Going to the gym is helping though. I can’t run as much miles at the gym (you have to run 10 laps to run a mile and running a lot of miles on the treadmill hurts my legs), but at least I am running. Running is hard during the winter, with the cold and daylight savings, but going to the gym does help.  

It seems like everyone is always busier in the winter. I don’t know if it’s because of school or holidays or a mixture of both, but I am having a hard time finding someone to run with and I really don’t like to run by myself. The people I normally run with either can’t run right now, don’t want to run right now, or I just haven’t seen in a long time. So I am left running with my sister and she has less motivation then me. I find it almost impossible to run more than four miles by myself and my sister hates running more than three miles, so most days I am only running two to four miles. Considering that I ran at least five miles a day in the weeks before cross country started, four miles being my longer runs is really bad for me. With everyone being busy, I am left running shorter miles.

 

Cold weather, daylight savings, and the busy season is making it really hard for me to get my miles in. I am going to continue to try to toughen it out and push myself to run more.

               

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An Inspiration to All: Drew Wall

A couple of weeks ago a really great guy passed away. His name was Drew Wall and he was an inspiration to all of us at Kennedy High School. He had been battling cancer since 7^th grade and on November 26^th, he passed away. He was an amazing guy and I look up to him.

Drew was in my Chinese III class, after skipping Chinese II, because he was extremely smart and he was in my Biology class last year. His health made it really hard for him to make it to class, but on the few days that he showed up he outsmarted all of us. I have never heard him say one thing bad or negative about anything. He was a good student and even though he went true so much he always stayed positive. We get too caught up in the little things and life and we find the need to complain about everything that doesn’t go our way, but Drew battled cancer for 5 years and never complained, never lost hope, and always remained optimistic. I hope that I can be like him one day and I hope that he inspires others to be more like him too.

Another thing that really impresses me about Drew is that he always had faith in God, even when everything wasn’t going his way and almost everyone else was asking God, why did it have to be Drew, how could someone so good have something so bad happen to him? But Drew never lost faith and I will never forget that.

Drew was also one of the strongest people I have ever met. He went through so much, but he always seemed like he was doing just fine. He was a golfer, he went out for swimming for a while last year, and he did everything that a normal teenager did with one leg instead of two. He was extremely brave and he let nothing get in his way.

I will never forget Drew’s positivity, everlasting faith, and strength, which continues to inspire me and a lot of others at Kennedy High School. Drew will be missed by so many people, but I hope that everyone learns something about him, whether that be to remain faithful in God during all times, or to simply complain less.

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Gift Giving

Christmas is approaching and I need to try to come up with gifts for my friends and family. For some people this is quite easy to do and for other people, like me, it’s almost impossible. I am extremely poor right now (just spent my last dollar at Chick-fil-a last night), so that pretty much means I have to either beg my mom for cash and get everyone really cheap crappy gifts or I have to make them something. Why is gift giving so hard?

I think standards for gift giving have been raised a lot, especially as I am getting older. People either want something expensive or something meaningful. What happened to the days when I could just draw my parents a picture and give my sisters and friends a pack of gum? Now everyone can buy their own gum and my parents have stopped appreciating my poorly colored pictures from the coloring books I have owned since I was 6. I really would like to get people something meaningful, but thanks to my lack of creativity that’s a lot harder said than done. I have been spending hours on pinterest trying to come up with something creative, but everything involves money and a lot of time and talent. So every year I end up getting my friends and family something from the dollar store, while they get something either expensive or creative and I end up looking really stupid. Expectations for giving gifts are getting ridiculously high.

It is also hard to know who to give gifts to. I definitely can’t afford to give gifts to all my friends and there’s no way all my friends will give gifts to me, but how am I supposed to know which friends are going to get me something? Some of my friends are doing secret Santa, which I thought meant that I didn’t have to give any gifts to any of the friends that are also doing secret Santa until one of them came up to me and said that she was so excited to give me my gift and that it was such an amazing gift. Great. I have no idea who I am supposed to give gifts to and I don’t want to be mean and not give someone a gift when they got me one. So I am left trying to think of the people who are my best friends and would give me a gift, which is extremely hard.

I am not sure if it is hard for everyone to give gifts. Maybe it’s just natural for some people, but for people like me, gift giving can be a long and difficult process. With the higher expectations and trying to decide who to give gifts to, preparing for Christmas can be quite stressful.  

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How do they do it?

“Run forest, run.” One of the most famous lines in a very famous movie is this line that Jennie yelled at Forest Gump whenever he was in trouble. Forest ends up running all the way across the United States at one point in the movie and I know that it is just a movie, but some very impressive people make me wonder whether that is really possible. I have heard of people running so many miles, that it seem extremely impossible to me.

Over the summer I went to Wartburg Cross Country camp where some very interesting runners came to talk to us. They ran the marathon in the Olympic Trials a few years back and placed 8^th and 9^th. I am already extremely impressed by marathoners, it seems impossible to me to run 24 miles nonstop. The longest I have ever ran was 13 miles and by the end I was completely starving, almost falling asleep, and I was running out of things to think and talk about. And if running a marathon isn’t enough, these girls were running at under a 6 minute pace!!!! My pace for 2.5 miles in the state cross country meet was 5:45, how could they run just slightly slower than that for 23.5 miles more! Marathoners are extremely impressive, running 26 miles seems impossible to me.

Another extremely impressive race is one that a leader at my friends’ church ran in. He said that it was a 24 hour race, where there was a 10 mile lap and whoever could complete the most laps won. He ended up finishing 23 and he ran 6 full laps!!!!! How could at least 23 people run 60 or more miles in one day!!!! How could your body take that? How could you even walk 60 miles in one day? It seems so ridiculously hard that I didn’t even believe him at first, I just don’t understand how people could run so much in one day.

There are a lot of extremely impressive people out there who can run unbelievably long distances in a crazy amount of time. It is extremely impressive and almost inspires me. Who knows maybe I will be a marathoner or run a 24 hour race in the future and accomplish what seems impossible to me right now.

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The Wonders of Winter Running

I am laying on the ground, my heart pumping, my lungs still burning, and my body completely numb and I realize it is only going to get worse. It is only December 5th and I am already questioning why I put myself through the torture of running in the winter. There are so many things that make me despise winter running, but in the end I will probably end up running all winter, because I want to get better (and in the past I didn't really run in the winter and regretted it a lot when Track started).

I think almost every runner hates running in the cold. It burns your lung and you have to wear what seems like 50 pounds of clothing to not freeze to death. It sucks! Anyone who says they like to run in the winter is either a) lying b) runs to the end of the driveway and back and thinks they get an extra piece of cake for dinner, because they worked soooo hard or c) THEY ARE CRAZY, so if you like running in the winter then I am sorry to hurt your feelings, but your probably crazy. Although, I don’t think I have ever ran in the snow, I think it would be extremely hard and dangerous and add to why I don’t like to run in the cold. I do love to run and I would hate to stop now, but it’s hard to love something when you are scared of freezing to death because of it. Running in the cold isn’t fun, but you have to gear up, get out there, and try to forget about how bad you feel, because you will regret not running in the winter when spring comes and you’re completely out of shape.

I also don’t like to run in the winter, because it is in the school year and it seems like you always have some kind of excuse to not run. In the cross Country and Track season, when you have a big test or you’re really busy that night you go to practice anyway, because you are dedicated to the team, but in the winter when you have a test or your busy you just don’t run, because it’s the offseason and you don’t make your coach mad when you miss one day of running in the winter. Unfortunately, some people miss a lot of days and it seems like I am almost always running by myself or with people who aren’t my speed.

It is also hard to run in the winter, because the holidays are coming and you feel like you have better things to do. You have to go see your family, bake cookies, set up the Christmas tree, and so much more that running ends up being pushed back on the to-do list that it is hard to get to it. By the time you get through everything and you have time to run its dark out (daylight savings= another thing bad about winter running) and you are exhausted. Almost everyone is extremely busy during the holiday season and that just makes running so much harder.

There are a lot of things that make running in the winter really hard. The cold making it hard to breath and forcing you to wear a thousand layers of clothes, school and other things that make it hard for people to run every day, and the Holidays, where you are too busy to even consider running until it’s too late, all make it hard to run in the winter. No matter how hard it is to get yourself out there and run, it is so important that there is no way you will regret it when Track starts.

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A Hope in the Unseen

In AP Lang I am reading A Hope in the Unseen. It is about a boy named Cedric who goes to Ballou High School. The school is in a “ghetto” neighborhood and most kids who go to the school couldn’t care less about school and getting an education, but Cedric is different. He strives to get good grades and wants to learn. Even though Cedric wants to be proud of his grades and appreciated for them, students at the school make fun of kids like Cedric who have good grades and Cedric is forced to try and hide the fact that he has good grades. There are a lot of similarities and differences between Ballou high school and the school I attend, Kennedy.

Ballou high school, Kennedy high school, and probably every high school around have students that don’t care about school. There are students that don’t mind failing and are happy when they pass a class, simply because they don’t have to retake the class next year. A lot of times these students make fun of straight A students, like how Phillip makes fun of Cedric in A Hope in the Unseen. Good students are called names and get made fun of by students who don’t try. Everywhere you go there will always be people who don’t care and don’t try hard and sometimes they make fun of the kids who do try hard.

There are underachieving kids in every school, but I think Ballou has a lot more of them than most schools. In Ballou the majority of kids don’t try and in Kennedy I think most of the kids do try. This makes Cedric and other straight A students try to hide the fact that they are good students, to avoid ridicule. They skip assemblies to avoid being called names and getting beat up later. I think this makes Kennedy and Ballou very different. Although there may be some name calling at Kennedy, people don’t hide from assemblies or go to such extremes to avoid being bullied about grades, because there are so many people who also get good grades.

There are kids at both Kennedy and Ballou that don’t try hard, but there is so many kids at Ballou that don’t try hard that kids at Ballou think that it is dangerous to be recognized for being a good student, so they try to hide from other students and the fact that they have good grades. Although there are similarities between Kennedy and Ballou, there are a lot differences that make it hard for students to be successful at Ballou.

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Staying in Shape for the Holidays

There is about three weeks until Christmas break, which means three weeks until fun, family, stomachaches from eating too much and guilt from realizing how out of shape you are getting. It is hard for everyone to exercise during break and after taking a couple weeks off from working out you pretty much lose all of the hard work you have done and have to start over with your training. There are still ways that you can keep in shape through the holiday season, but it won’t be easy.

          A great way to keep in shape is to watch what you are eating during specific times. It’s almost impossible to limit what you eat when you’re at a relative’s house and there is a dessert table, filled with mouthwatering treats that you only get on special occasions. You can still eat all of those delicious desserts, but if you can try to limit the portions you eat and the amount you eat at one time. Make sure you save the desserts and the unhealthy foods for the parties though, just because its Christmas break doesn’t mean you can go crazy and eat a Christmas feast on December 21^st. Make sure you keep those cookies locked up and out of reach until it is actually Christmas.

          YOU STILL NEED TO WORKOUT. Almost everyone says that they plan to work out over the break, but when the time comes you don’t feel like it or you’re too busy and after a week of saying this you are  already out of shape. Plan to work out at a specific time every day and make sure you do it. It is very helpful to have a friend to work out with, because you can’t just ditch your friends because you don’t want to work out. It also helps to work out in the morning, so you can just get it out of the way and it won’t interfere with your plans for the day. It can be hard to work out during the holidays, but if you really try to exercise, you will be thankful you did.

          Staying healthy and in shape over the holiday break can be extremely difficult. We often make excuses for why we can’t exercise and cave in to unhealthy food, but if you try really hard, eat healthy while you’re not at parties, and make time to work out, you can stay in shape for the holiday’s.

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