Senior Stories: Anais, One Mile at a Time
Anais is a recently graduated SRLA student from North Torrance High School. She was awarded an SRLA Scholarship which will be used to help fuel the next chapter of her academic journey as a Biology major at UC Davis.
Anais (left) with Rachel after finishing the Rose Bowl Half Marathon.
Participating in SRLA has been an enriching personal experience. I have always strived to push myself personally, academically and in all aspects of my life. Playing soccer all my life, I had a solid foundation of running and exercise before SRLA. Consequently, when I saw a yellow “SRLA” poster in the quad on campus my junior year of high school, I did not hesitate to join the club. The idea of running a marathon interested me because it gave me the opportunity to strengthen and enhance one of my current abilities.
Anais (right) with her best friend Rachel running the 2023 Los Angeles Marathon.
Throughout my experience in SRLA, my relationship with running deepened. SRLA taught me that I can do things that seem impossible and influenced me to push my limits. It motivated me and made me believe that I can work hard. While running, during the fifth and fifteenth mile I would get a random burst of energy and felt invincible. I think something that really helps me through hard things, just talking to myself and talking to myself and having this real thing. Reassuring myself that I can do it. I'm strong. Yeah, I'm capable of this. I'm really just talking to myself in a really kind way. It's something that I think is really easy that I can do anytime at any moment. This feeling helped me instill confidence and positivity in myself. I had some of the most fruitful conversations with myself and my best friend Rachel during the SRLA experience. We would talk about our future: college, career, families, traveling and more. While running, it felt like nobody but us, nothing else matters, and all we had to focus on was finishing one task at a time.
As a very impulsive and ambitious person SRLA helped to ground me. For one, while running, there is nothing else you can do. Running is a very calming and mindful experience. While running I could not multitask, I can only complete one thing at a time: completing one mile at a time. In the future I will continue to promote a healthy lifestyle to the community around me. Being a leader in my school through various clubs i would love to promote SRLA and I even had the idea of making the service clubs at our school help to pass water during the LA Marathon and other events to bring awareness to running and a healthy lifestyle as a whole.
Finishing it was hard. Like, physically it was very, very exhausting, but it was also very, very rewarding. Like just knowing that I had finished that was really, really amazing. She ran the LA Marathon this past March. I want to do another marathon next year and hopefully get my friends and family to run it with me. I will also definitely encourage my future kids to be active and hopefully continue to do marathons with me. I promised myself that this is only the beginning and this is not the only marathon I will complete. Having completed this challenge I see how important health and fitness are to your mental and physical health and the confidence that one gets from these experiences.
Anais when asked “What life skills did SRLA help you develop?”
I mean, aside from the physical part, like, in shape and things like that, it definitely strengthened my mentality towards things that are hard. I just remember myself like, I can do this, you can keep going just one more mile or whatever. So it really just helped. That mentality really helped me just get through things that are tough, and that just helps with change and growth overall. Oh, yeah, the ability to persevere. I don't know why. Maybe I just had this experience personally, but I felt like this easier to do like running the school.
“I promised myself that this is only the beginning and this is not the only marathon I will complete.”