Assignment 21 - William Begley - Breathing and Running

I have asthma and a deviated septum which means my nose is messed up and I can only breathe from my left nostril. I have also always loved playing sports and particularly ones that make you run a lot which is a bad match for a guy that can't breathe very well. In elementary school I was always one of the fastest but I was never the one that could get 80 on the pacer test. I got mad. I've always been extremely competitive, not the kind of competitive where I want to win the game or beat my friends, I want to be the best. I try hard to make sure I always am as close to this as possible. Running was always a specific challenge for me because I was built to suck at it, I was also a chubby kid and never felt like the most athletic but I knew I had to be. So, I started running as hard as I could whenever I could, on the pacer test, in gym class, during field day and I got better. Fifth grade is when it all started to come together for me and I got the fastest mile time and the farthest in the pacer test in my gym class. This wasn't enough for me though and I knew I had to try harder, so in sixth grade I joined the football team so I would be forced to run. During sixth and seventh grade I just kept getting better then during tryouts for the eight grade team I really started to feel my asthma and couldn't run, I had to stop and I wasn't allowed to do football that year. That made me more angry than I would like to admit and I just kept working. Now, I can safely say I am a stronger runner than a majority of my peers and my asthma has become so unnoticeable I often forget about it. I haven't worked as hard to improve my running recently but just earlier today I tried timing my mile for the first time in years and can do a 7 minute mile comfortably so I think I've done pretty good.