Hi everyone welcome to my second blog post! This time I am interviewing someone very important in my life, my twin sister Carley. Carley is a collegiate runner in the NCAA for Springfield College. Carley has such a passion for running, but she is struggling with her mental health.
She was very successful in high school and was one of the top runners on her team. She runs a 5:27 mile and a 3:13 1,000 meter. She attended the NHIAA Divison One State Championships her senior year for both indoor and outdoor track.
However, running has not always been picture perfect for her. Carley has struggled with her body image. For both of us, we have always been known to be “twigs” or “sticks”. In high school, Carley was underweight and struggled with finding the perfect diet. This also related to how in high school, she received little to no strength training. She was never properly trained on how to lift weights.
Because of this, adjusting to collegiate running has been difficult. Going into her first collegiate preseason, she was very uneducated on how important strength training is for injury prevention and improving running strength in general. Also, in high school, Carley ran approximately twenty to twenty-five miles per week. In college, this increased to thirty to thirty-five miles per week. This put a lot of stress on her knees, specifically her left knee.
Carley has suffered runner's knee, a common overuse injury popular among runners, resulting in her wearing a brace her entire cross country season and an early end to her first collegiate indoor track season. She also had to attend daily sessions with her athletic trainer. This included heat treatment, strengthening exercises, and icing.
This was Carley's first major injury and it affected her not just physically. She consulted an athletic counselor at Springfield who specializes in sports psychology. Carley had to learn that running is not just about hitting certain times, paces, or personal bests. It is about being competitive and truly appreciating the grind and the process of the sport. Racing is all about being mentally engaged. Her athletic counselor helped her create a visual strategic racing plan and this helped Carley become mentally present in all of her races. This plan helps her breakdown each race into sections. For example, at the NEWMAC Championship at Franklin Park in Boston, MA, she knew that the hardest part of the course was in the middle, which was a 200-meter straight incline. She knew that after this hill, it would be a straight downhill to the finish. Her teammates also were on the hill cheering her on which helped her even more.
After months of rehab and cross-training, Carley is finally back on track (pun intended). She is now focusing on her sophomore cross country season. She hopes to run a 5k personal best and continue to work on her mental toughness.
The picture on the right is Carley finishing a race her senior year of high school. On the right, is Carley at Springfield media day.
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