Forced to Fly: How I Learned to Love Running and Everything With Itforced to Fly: How I Learned to Love Running and Everything With It by Jackson

Forced to Fly: How I Learned to Love Running and Everything With Itforced to Fly: How I Learned to Love Running and Everything With It by Jackson - January 2026 Scholarship Essay

After sitting around for about two years, my dad decided it was time to push me into a sport. He dropped me off at cross country practice halfway through the season, gave me a pat on the back, and left me with the runners. I had little expectations until after the first meet; I got eighth and beat every runner on the other team. Running became my sport. Since that year in eighth grade, I’ve been to states, and nationals. But running, while important to me, has even more significant effects on my growth as a student and friend.

Cross Country is the reason I know so many brilliant people today. After fifth grade I left the elementary school I’d attended for most of my elementary years. Only one other student from that school ended up switching to Fairport, and he went to the other middle school. It was a bit of a struggle making friends until I entered cross country. There were runners that knew me of whom I had never even talked to before. My now great friend Austin said he recognized me from the zoom meets during COVID. The group of people I met in eighth grade XC make up the majority of my friend group.

A less conventional reason I love running is due to how meditative it can be. When thinking of relaxing things, running is likely one of the last things that comes to mind. You would expect the 40 minutes of practicing my oboe every morning and night to be the most calming, but I’ve never had more clarity than an hour of thoughts to myself on a run. I could be thinking about plans, a movie I watched the night before, or I could even be manifesting a theme for an English project. These moments of lucidity lead me to solutions. Whenever I talk about this, I think of a runner on our team, Henry who essentially needs running to operate. I was stunned when he told me that he gets up at 5:30 in the morning to ride on his stationary bike which he hilariously placed directly next to his bed (there's a funny photo of it somewhere). Running is more to me, and Henry, than just a sport we’re good at.

Beyond this, running has been my way to cross my academic interests with my athletic ones. As of right now I’m planning on majoring in Data Science in college. Running ties into this perfectly. Whether it’s calculating splits, ranking times, or comparing courses analytically, running has been my outlet for combining technology and math. After cross country ended last year, I made a track-oriented website to properly calculate composite relays so our team could better determine if we had qualified for nationals. I’ve also made google sheets that compile over 3000 runners to estimate how our team would rank in the different cross country seasons. I can’t think of a better activity to combine my passion for mathematics and athletics.

I’m not ready for my high school cross country career to be over, but I’m excited to run in college. Running has been so good to me over these past years and I’m more than happy to share my knowledge with the underclassmen as I near my last race. Running has made me more thoughtful and reflective. So as I look back to one event that changed my growth, joining cross country showed me a strength and a lot of benefits to go with it. An old team motto of ours is mind over miles. Though I’m leaving my high school team behind, the impact high school running has had on me will resonate for decades to come.