Week 14: Spring Vibes, Tennis Duels, and Tough Lessons on the Track
“The real purpose of running isn’t to win a race; it’s to test the limits of the human heart.” — Bill Bowerman
By: Hong Bing Tang Month Day, Year
00/00/202- to 00/00/202-
Introduction:
What’s up all! I wish you all had a pretty good week! My week has been very low key with some busy events. This week, the spring weather has finally come and the weather was beautiful with the sun and temps being 50-70 degrees it made for a week of being outside. Let’s get into what I did this week!
Work:
On Monday and Tuesday this week, I worked at the tutoring center at the library, a job that I did last semester on a consistent schedule. This semester with classes late at night, I was not able to be added to the regular schedule for tutoring. So instead I was like a “free agent” and could pick up other people’s shifts as needed. However, with having class from 5-7pm Mon-Thurs, it made it impossible to be able to pick up other peoples shifts. Plus even if I could pick up part of their shift, it would have been after a full day of classes and practice. However, my partner in crime, Michael—who I worked with all of last semester—had an exam that he had to take on Monday and Tuesday this week and since no one else could take the shift, I decided to take it up.
Going into these shifts, I was quite nervous, since I had not tutored since last December I and this semester the amount of calculus I was doing in my engineering classes was a minimal I knew my tutoring skills and math skills were quite rusty. However I am looking forward to have fun and doing my passion of helping people. Luckily and unluckily for me, the MAC was absolutely dead. On Monday it was so dead that I did not even get to tutor a single person. Tuesday was slightly better as during the last hour of the shift, a person showed up and I was able to help them through exponential growth/decay. I am not going to lie, it was quite rusty and the person was slightly confused when I explained the topic to him, however, they eventually got it! Overall I was happy to get back into the MAC center and hope that next semester I will be able to tutor on the regular schedule.
Steve date!
With the weather being so nice, and Steve basically being done with all his classes, I got to spend a lot of time with my boy Steve. On Wednesday evening, Steve and I took a walk around campus and watched the sunset. It was really pretty outside, and the weather was fabulous, being around 60 degrees with minimal clouds. It was good to walk around and talk about the semester and mess with him. I am glad that I went with him because I love going on walks and spring and fall are some of the best times to walk around, especially around campus since there are some great spots. In addition, since we were on campus of course we had to take advantage and get some food—thanks Aiden and Miciah!
Then on Thursday night, after another very nice day, Steve and I headed to the tennis courts to have an ultimate matchup. After living with each other for nearly 8 months, we had not played tennis, so I was excited to be competitive and shake off the rust since I hadn’t played tennis since last fall. It went well, and after warming up, we had some pretty good rallies. We then played a couple of matches that were close but luckily for me I was able to win most of the matches and now he can’t hold it over me that he is better at tennis than me.
Last SAAC meeting:
On Wednesday, we had the last SAAC meeting of the year. SAAC has been fun and also slightly time-consuming time demand for me this year. With the constant battle with trying to plan events and keeping student athletes engaged it took a decent amount of time. However, it is rewarding since it helps me learn how to manage a group of very busy individuals like me and to go about it. For our last SAAC meeting, we did a walkthrough of the main event of the month, the Maroon and Gold Gala, an athletics celebration and award ceremony. After this, we then did a celebration of the year and did a game night! Our whole group decided to play a huge game of Mafia which was fun. Unfortunately, I died quite early on because I was supposably “too quiet” and was not the Mafia, so I was a spectator for the rest of the game. It was a good game but eventually at the end, there were 2 mafia, and 3 “townspeople” left. The mafia did good at killing off and blaming other people which is amazing since normally the mafia have a hard time winning. Overall, it was a good wrap for the year. This upcoming year, I want to make it my goal to start working on some sort of student athlete engagement competition to increase student athlete engagement. I hope to jumpstart this over the summer.
GVSU:
On Saturday, we had our last race of the track season which was GVSU extra weekend. I was running the 5k and was looking to rebound after a rough 5k two weeks ago. Going into the race, I was looking be competitive and was set up in a heat that was good for me to hang on and run well! Knowing that I would start to hurt around 3k in, my goal was to focus on the phrase “how bad do I want it” and that would help me try to stay competitive and try to catch people. Going into the race I was feeling happy and grateful to be able to be back on the track. I did have a little bit of anxiety however it was not too bad. The race went out good for me and I was on pretty good pace after the first mile. Things started to get hard at this point and I made some moves to stay onto the pack. However, when I lost the pack, I just stopped fighting. I am not entirely sure and even after repeating my phrases, hearing things from coaches, and telling myself the pain after the race for not pressing was going to be worse than the suffering I for the next 10 minutes, I just stopped and stayed in the limbo that happened at my last 5k. After the race I had a wide range of emotions consisting of confusion, annoyance, and disappointment. What I know is that even though I am physically getting fitter, my times are not improving since my mindset and mentality sucks. I am mentally weak during races. However, what puzzles me is how to solve this, my workouts go well, and they are hard and my mentality on them are pretty good. Additionally, how I approach races is not time oriented but is a mixture of gratitude and just giving it my all. I am not entirely sure how to fix my problem, but I will have a meeting with my coaches to talk about this.
Conclusion:
This week showed me that progress isn’t just about doing the right things—it’s about learning how to stay locked in when it gets hard. Whether it’s getting back into tutoring, winning tennis matches, or battling through a race, the mental game matters just as much as the physical. I don’t have all the answers yet, but I’m determined to keep figuring it out one step at a time.
Goals Update!
Journaling: Journaled twice this week
Nail biting: I keep saying that I am going to stop but I do not. I will not bite my right thumb this week
Reading: I have read through about 150 pages of the mental side of racing book
Phone usage: An average of 1 hour and 16 minutes. Just got back to my normal routine.
Future: Emailed about my research thing and am hoping I will get more information so I can plan transportation for the spring COSA meeting. Good for me since I normally procrastinate about this type of stuff. Also called Keisha about move out information.
Get in Touch
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