By Abby Sammut

Edited by Jessica Liu and Alloe Mak

The race was three-quarters finished by the time we entered the forest. The path was narrow and winding, almost labyrinthine, with age-old evergreen trees towering overhead, guarding the trail against any light that dared try to enter. A faint wind attempted to whistle through the chilly air, but was muffled by the sounds of thudding footsteps and rapid, desperate breathing. After what felt like an eternity, the forest broke off, allowing the trail to expand into a wide, grassy clearing. Almost there. The sunlight beamed down, bright and startling, thawing the ground and radiating warmth onto my skin. Solace arrived in the form of the tall arch of the finish line, staring me down from ahead as I sighed internally in relief. To my dismay, however, I’d celebrated too soon; with ten meters to go, four girls rushed past me, edging me out by mere milliseconds.

My life could be summed up as a series of almosts. It is borderline Sisyphean; I am cursed with forever rolling boulders up a hill, only to have them plunge back down, catapulting me right back to square one. Despite a few rocky starts, I eventually establish my footing on the hill, allowing myself a sense of stability—of confidence. Often, the taste of success becomes almost tangible; so close that I need only to reach out slightly further in order to grasp it. However, this balance is always short-lived. It disperses even more rapidly than it materializes, and I tumble down, the rock landing on top of me, compressing my chest, forcing the air out from my lungs.

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When I was twelve, I had my first real taste of failure. At the time, my identity could have been consolidated into one word: swimmer. Swimming was my first love, and, as first loves have the tendency to do, it tore me to shreds when it left. There was an unforgiving nature to the sport, one that proved to be a recipe for disaster when combined with my inability to cope with failure and stubborn disposition towards setting expectations too high. I was fixated on making two National standards—times that would qualify me to race in California that coming July and allow me to train throughout the summer. For weeks, I blasted The Mamas & The Papas’ only hit song on repeat while adorning my walls with the qualification standards I’d long since committed to memory. Competition season rolled around, and I missed the qualifying standard by an eighth of a second. One eighth. While my teammates were packing their bags and browsing travel itineraries, I was stuck without a place to train—left to kick myself for not having been fractionally better, to dwell on what could have been, what almost was. 

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Despite having grown up with parents who relished in Christmas Santa Shuffle 5ks and Sunday long runs, I spent most of my childhood avoiding any activity involving running. It wasn’t until the pandemic-induced pool closures made typical training virtually impossible that I began to drag one foot in front of the other in a painful attempt at cross-training. Somewhere along the way, however, the three kilometre stop-filled jogs turned into continuous 6ks, and the grueling punishment that was running morphed into an endorphin-fuelled escape that slowly became a consistent source of joy—my favourite part of each day.

I’d always had the hope of going to an American university as a swimmer; a five year dream that stayed intact even after I traded in my cap and goggles for a Garmin watch and a pair of Hoka Cliftons. 

Despite a far from seamless transition (turns out that years in the water don’t exactly prepare your muscles for pounding pavement six times a week) that led into a rocky first year, I clung intransigently to this fantastical dream for a myriad of reasons, ranging from visions of training under lofty palm trees and thirty-degree weather to a hope of finally silencing the nagging voices in my head that relentlessly bombarded me with the feeling that I was wasting my time, that it was too late, that I would never be good enough. 

The impracticality (insanity) of the situation gradually became impossible to ignore; I would be paying out-of-state tuition to walk on to a small town university team in middle-of-nowhere Florida just for the opportunity to train on a team with girls recruited from Australia and The Netherlands who’d likely run faster in the seventh grade than I ever would in my life. 

Despite the bitterness of this realization (yet again, having come so close, just for everything to fall apart in the home stretch), I couldn’t help but feel a strong sense of relief. For the first time in years, the time crunch was gone, the stress had dissipated, and I could breathe freely; almost as though a boulder sized weight had been lifted off of my chest. 

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I have always envisioned my future while wearing extremely rose-coloured glasses. No room has been left for imperfection as my obsessively-planned, idealized version of what’s to come encompasses everything from the step-by-step process of someday becoming a surgeon, to finishing residency, packing my bags, and finally moving to my dream city. 

I have always been told that life is what you make of it. That you can, to a certain extent, control the future—that with enough dedication, enough undying resolve, you can make any dream into a reality. I had been unwaveringly inflexible in my hope of achieving these goals—so much so that the pressure to be infallible had slowly become all-consuming. Every tiny mistake was a catastrophe, and any moment spent focusing on something other than the future was something to be chastised. Needless to say, the words “contingency plan” were not a part of my vocabulary. 

I have always believed that growth could only come from learning to work harder, to go further, to find another way around any obstacle that obstructed my path. It was a striking realization that some things cannot be forced, cannot be controlled, no matter how hard we try. 

Almosts are essential to growth and implacably intertwined with life. There are no guarantees, and despite our best efforts, we cannot always push the boulder to the top of the hill—all we can do is learn to appreciate the view on the way up and acknowledge how far we have climbed.