Bethany's Blog

     In June of 2021 American distance runner Shelby Houlihan learned that she tested positive for an anabolic steroid called nandrolone. She received a four year ban from completion and also lost her appeal though she stated that it was a false positive due to a pork burrito she ate from a food truck under 12 hours before her test was taken.      Shelby Houlihan is the American record holder in the 1500-meter and 5000-meter run. She is also from Iowa which being an Iowan myself made her one of my favorite runners. In 2018 I competed in Nike Cross Country Regionals-Heartland where she attended the spaghetti dinner the night before the race where I got to meet her, my first track olympian, get a picture with her and her autograph. I idolized and looked up to her as a runner, well that was until the news of her failed test came out.      When you look up to someone you don't want to believe they could do any wrong and...

      The other day when we were in our second class in the library I was talking with Dr. Kyburz about my paper. At the time I hadn't really started my paper and was talking about how I should frame my paper and decide exactly what to write about. Then it hit me part way through the conversation, I'm so much of a perfectionist that I procrastinate starting stuff because I want to do it right the first time.      While my perfectionism tends to come out the most visibly at practice or in whatever athletic activity I'm doing at the time I always strive to be as flawless as I possibly can be. Even for just hobbies like figure skating I get quickly obsessed with wanting to master my technique and be able to get as many skills as possible as close to perfect as possible. While in sports I've found this to be very useful as long I can avoid overthinking and stressing over something in class it presents more of a problem.  ...

      When I was in high school I always knew no matter what I wanted to do sports in college. Whether it was triathlon or cross country and track I didn't care. All I wanted was to have a team that I could have as a built in friend group and a group of people passionate about the same thing as me.     Now that I've been through high schools sports and now a full season of college triathlon I've noticed that doing sports in high school and in college while in the way are the same are also vastly different from each other. Granted I've only had a triathlon season which isn't technically a high school sport so I can't yet speak on differences directly between like college or high school track for example but I can slightly compare it to when I did swimming and cross country in the same season in high school.     In high school my typical fall days consisted of a swim or dryland swim practice in the morning before school, getting a quick bite to...

      As I'm starting to research for my rational argument one thing I'm quickly finding is how limited research is on certain topics which is making it hard for me to select certain topics and forced me to change what I want my paper to be about.      This isn't the first time I've had issues with this on research papers. In high school I was wanting to write a paper on mental and physical abuse within sports but was met with few papers that truly explored the topics in a way I could use in my paper. Most of the research done was more focused on sexual abuse rather than mental or physical abuse. I ended up shifting my focus to sexual abuse in order to get the amount of content I needed.      For this paper I was initially wanting to write about carbon plated running shoes and racing spikes to see if you truly get the performance advantages that are advertised and is it worth the price that comes with those types of shoes. I was als...

Superstition, according to the Oxford Dictionary   definition , is " the belief that particular events happen in a way that cannot be explained by reason or science; the belief that particular events bring good or bad luck " While there are widely known superstitions such as 13 being unlucky, knocking on wood to not jinx something, walking under a ladder, black cats, and many more but many people also have their own personal superstitions.  With my being an athlete most of my personal superstitions lie within  competitions whether it be the build up to one or during. Some of them for me are certain hairstyles for certain sports such as double dutch for only triathlons and either a couple smaller braids into a straightened ponytail or a small dutch braid into a single French braid for track.  While some people argue that sup erstitions don't mean anything, that's something I beg to differ. When you have a superstition that if you do it you do ...