So. Define "X."

Let's start with the basics. I'm about to go to college. Obviously, every new college student wants to avoid the freshman 10…or 15. I am no exception. I’m Sam. A senior at Hawken School in Gates Mills, Ohio. I’ve always been an athlete—you know, the little kid in the overalls and pigtails on the playground who, between digging for worms and chugging chocolate milk, was out on the field tearing after which ever runny nosed little boy had the ball at the moment, playing full-on tackle football. Mind you, most of this was while the rest of my female compadres jumped rope or practiced cheerleading, raising a fifth-grade disapproving eyebrow at the one of their own covered in mud and smelling kind of funny. Eventually, I would go on to discover make-up, and boys, and earrings, and other such “girly” essentials. But that hard-core, gritty competitor was one part of me that never left. I never could have imagined my life without the Sunday drives to soccer tournaments and the post-game rehash with my super-fan, insanely athletic dad. That is, until the first day of my senior year.

In soccer, I play goalie. How's this for a freak accident: in my borderline psychotic, “anything to prevent a goal, no matter how irrational it might seem” mentality, I came flying off the goal line to avoid what would clearly have been a goal, and slide tackled a six-foot behemoth, sending the ball ricocheting out of bounds. Oh, what a beautiful play it was! Until the agonizing pain of my broken fibula sank in after about three seconds. That little lapse in judgment kick started a senior year filled with doctors appointments, full-leg casts, bones that refused to heal, an excruciatingly painful basketball season, and landed me in not one, but two casts over the course of 12th grade—I opted for tie-dye the second time, which proved to be a nice change of pace from the glow in the dark I had the first go-around. I mean, if I’m going to have a cast, it might as well be ridiculous.

I got that second lovely hunk of plaster (or fiber glass if we’re going to be completely correct) after getting surgery on March 22, where I’ve been told Dr. Goodwin at the Cleveland Clinic inserted some form of metal do-hickey in my right leg to hold the two floppy sections of fibula together in hopes that the compression might stimulate some bone growth. For good measure they snagged some bone marrow from my hip and shot it in there, in case the bone didn’t get the message to get busy healing from the metal plate alone.

Bottom line is, this year I got to experience life where sports were not the main focus. While my teammates took recruiting trips and talked about their options, I planned Homecoming and built up my portfolio. I decided that it was art, not soccer, that would be taking me to college.

Now, that was all fine and dandy (except for with my dad who took a little while to let this emotional blow sink in) until I realized one night as I scarfed down a bacon cheeseburger and munched on my brother’s French fries (just like always--i mean during my athletic career, food and I had always been pals. I needed all the fuel I could get in order to compete.) “Hey wait a minute…this was ok while I had sports every day…But before I go to college, I’m pretty sure some things are gonna have to change.” And BAM. Just like that, the idea for my senior project was hatched: Figure out a way for a kid going to college to stay healthy and active without the daily practices of high school sports to keep them in check. Everything from finding different forms of activity to fit individual styles, to what food choices to make. It's all here. So follow me on this quest to find a balanced, healthy life style for all those X-Athletes out there.


Friday, May 21, 2010

Week 3, Day 5 (A Shift In Gears)

I slept like a rock last night, most likely due to the fact that I had 3 personal training sessions and the hardest class I had ever taken in my life the day before. When I woke up, I realized I was late to drive my sister to school, so i ran downstairs, grabbed a Luna Bar and milks and ran out the door. Upon my return, I became aware that my breakfast lacked fruit, so I grabbed some pineapple rings and went on upstairs to blog.

Basically, my day was interrupted by the fact that it was my dad's birthday and instead of going to class or meeting with nurse Gali, I went out to dinner with my family to celebrate.

Instead of a regular post for today, or regular posts for the next week for that matter, I am going to talk to you about Holistic Living. It is a way of life that I am looking to adopt in college. The definition of holistic living, at least from the research I've done, is any lifestyle that offers you the tools to make you feel like a whole person--well in body, spirit, and mind.

I began looking into this approach for two reasons. The first, Ann Marie Cipolla, one of my trainers for this project. She is extremely holistic in her views and practices and it shows. She is balanced. She knows herself. She is confident and beautiful and takes joy in life. Those are all things that I aspire to one day have for myself, and I have really been looking to her as a role model on this journey.

The second reason touches on a subject that may make some uncomfortable, especially seeing as this is a blog specifically for school. But I'm not about hiding anything. One thing that I'm sure all of my teachers will give me is that I'm real. Despite my sometimes lack of respect, lack of regard for the rules, lack of effort, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants mentality and frequent last ditch attempt to save my own butt, they will at least acknowledge the fact that I'm pretty open and honest. With that being said, let's take a second to discuss alcohol.

Once you hit a certain age, it's everywhere. For me, that age was sixteen. Since then, I've had my fair share of run-ins with the stuff. Some experiences have been great fun, while others devastating and dangerous. I know that when I go to college, its use will only be more prevalent. It is a way for kids to meet people and loosen up, as well as offers an excuse for otherwise questionable behavior or decisions. But in these last weeks of my senior year, I have made a choice--I'm not going to drink in college (with a few qualifiers in there). Alcohol never really does anything good. It made me feel dangerous and invincible, when in reality, I was neither of those things. It made me forget about what was important. It made me feel sick the next morning. It made me constantly worry that I'd gained weight without realizing it. Biggest and worst of all, it made me feel extremely out of balance.

Right now in my life, I have a lot of amazing things.

By some miracle, I got into the #1 interior design program in the country. And it was a miracle because my grades were just not good enough to get in--there are no two ways about that. I plan to buckle down and work extremely hard to prove to UC that they made the right choice by admitting me, and to ensure that I get the best possible job in the field and am able to live the kind of life I want when I grow up.

I have a beautiful, supporting family who trusts me and wants me to be safe. They are also helping me pay for college. It would kill me to disappoint them.

And finally, I am in a relationship with someone who doubles as my best friend in the world. He will be a senior in high school next year so he won't be around to keep an eye on me constantly, and although he trusts me, I don't really trust myself with the combination of alcohol, a strange new place with 30,000 kids, and a 5 hour drive back home. That relationship is by far the most important thing in the world to me, and until something changes, I refuse to do anything that risks compromising that bond.

The more parties I go to, the more I realize that I'm over it. Alcohol is really an excuse--an excuse to not act like yourself. More and more I discover that acting like myself is exactly what I want to do. I have enough fun in my normal state of mind. Trust me.

So complicated back story aside, I'm not drinking in college. This mentality, I've found, fits perfectly with the holistic approach to life that Ann Marie talks about constantly. Because the purpose of this blog is to prepare me to live a healthy and well balanced lifestyle in college, for the last two weeks of project, I am going to shift gears and focus on how I am going to live and find balance, versus detailing my days. So from here on out, I will focus on figuring out how I'm going to live when I'm on my own. There are many aspects of this that I won't be able to adopt until I'm on my own because of my family situation, but many I will be able to start shifting to immediately.
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