Michelle guzman – former track & field student- athlete
Lace Up & Travel
The journey to becoming the first in my family to graduate from a NCAA, Division 1 University was not an easy one. Major obstacles came my way when my adopted father (who raised me by himself) passed away the week of the Regional track meet of my junior year in high school. Most athletic-minded people know that your junior year is the hot bed for recruitment and my dad spent most of it sick in the hospital. Thankfully, that past fall he was able to see me win the Texas 3A state title in cross-country. That was the last race he would ever see me run in. The same week he passed away I won and broke two of the regional records in the 1600 and 3200 meters. That week was one of the hardest weeks of my life knowing that I needed to make it to the state meet. Needless to say, I had to overcome many obstacles that the average 17-18 year old going into college hadn’t gone through yet.
With the support of my family and my amazing head coach (who I later went to work for post university), I obtained a full athletic scholarship, which is very rare in the running world, being that most of the time those prized scholarships are used for sprinters. Coming from a small town in central Texas to a bigger “city” in west Texas where everyone’s accent had a slightly more twang to it was an experience I’ll never forget. Coming onto a team where everyone was a state champion or made it to the state level was a humbling experience and pushed me to a level that I was looking for when I was getting recruited. Training with some of the best in the country was an honor and at times very challenging. We ended up winning the Big 12 Championships my sophomore, junior and senior year. I was nominated for the Big 12 “Woman of the Year” and was involved in the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee and Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I studied abroad in Mexico the summer going into my senior year and advocated for student-athletes to study abroad when I returned because the learning and growth that you gain from traveling outside the country is unprecedented and believe me you’ll never regret it. For me, that sparked the journey I am currently on in Morocco.
I mention all of the above because it was important for me to be involved in other things besides my sport. I was heavily involved in clubs and extracurricular activities in high school and I knew the importance of getting involved and giving back to the community. I knew that my running career was not going to pay the bills post-university and it was time to figure out what else I was good at and had passions for. Luckily for me that was teaching, coaching and traveling. I put the hard work into my academics and athletics to do long distant student teaching and volunteer coaching with my former high school coach in Houston.
There wasn’t much time for transition from my last summer class to going into the coaching world. Unfortunately, those early morning practices did not disappear but now I had the choice on if I WANTED to run. Well… sort of. We would run with our athletes to push them and motivate them. We wanted to show them that we had been in their shoes before too and that if we could still do it, they could as well. I was working with my coach from high school who still had to work through seeing me as a colleague now instead of his athlete. I was now graduated with new experiences and growth behind me that my coach had not been apart of. It took awhile for him to realize that but in time he did. We went on to coach teams to the state level and thanks to that experience that set the foundation for my teaching and coaching philosophy.
Being an actual “adult” was exhilarating but learning some “adult” things that aren’t exactly taught in high school or university was tough. For example, knowing how to manage money now that everything wasn’t being paid for and realizing that those “per diem” days were long gone was something I had to adapt to during my transition into teaching. There were also no more naps after 6 am morning practices. Those were replaced with a long 8-10 hour teacher workday and as well as afternoon practices which would mean getting into bed around 10-11 pm after lesson planning – this became daily routine. It was exhausting but I was still involved in something that I loved – running!
Running had a new meaning for me now as a post-collegiate athlete. I still loved running, however, even in the last year of my collegiate career I had started to feel like running was becoming a job as opposed to a passion. My athletic scholarship being reduced because of a virus going into my senior year when I competed at the NCAA Cross-Country Nationals with Mononucleosis, “Mono,” helped me to realize that college athletics was largely a business. I appealed the reduction, a decision that was hard to make and one that student-athletes do not know how to do or are scared to do because they do not want to strain their relations with their coaches. Unfortunately, I did not win the appeal but it reaffirmed that running at the collegiate level has a lot of other layers to it and helped me focus on my other talents and passions I had.
These days, I can run on my own terms, times and stress-free. One of the hardest things about running now is training without teammates. I genuinely loved running with my teammates in college because we would share stories and gossip throughout our hour training runs and that made the time go by faster. To be in enough shape to run over an hour AND have a full conversation is something I still dearly miss. It will take a few months for me to get back to the point where I can do that again. Also, having in-house competition, we were able to help each other become faster and stronger runners. Training runs now mean, lacing up after an 8-10 hour workday, just to keep my sanity from teaching 100+ teenagers everyday.
In a way, running was always therapeutic for me, ever since my dad passed away, something about not having to say anything, being alone with your thoughts but physically being able to use your body to exhibit the pain you were going through was soothing. Finding that new relationship with running was a journey but has led me to find out how intrinsically motivated I really am. Leading me to two Boston Marathon finish lines. : )
The other passion I had thankfully discovered in university was travelling, spending my 21st birthday in Mexico, learning and experiencing a new culture. I vowed from then on that every year I would spend my birthday outside of the country. Never in a million years would I have thought that 6 years later I wouldn’t be spending my birthday in Africa but actually living here. Stepping down from my coaching and teaching position in a great school district was a very hard decision to make but something that running and my coach taught me was ‘to make moves when the time was right’. If you wanted to drop an opponent in a race, you had to be bold and confident to make moves, if not then you are giving that competitor confidence that she can compete with you. And that was not going to happen. Pursuing my passion of teaching overseas so that I could travel was bold and took a lot of faith. Considering being a single female with no children, I had to be extra careful and observant when traveling alone. So far, I have traveled to 18 countries (and counting), living my best life and not having any regrets.
Getting involved and finding other passions besides your sport in university is the biggest piece of advice I would give any collegiate student-athlete. I credit God and the journey through running and the opportunities I had in university for where I am now. Take advantage of that. Exploring and running in some of the places that the majority of the people in the world will never get to see in their lifetime is a blessing that I don’t take for granted. Let your sport be a catalyst to your dreams, you won’t be disappointed.