It was a hot, grueling day in my hometown of Midland, Texas. The temperature outside was one hundred and two degrees with about thirty percent humidity. As the final school bell rang to signal the end of the day, hundreds of students rushed outside into their vehicles to turn their air conditioning on. The football players all migrated towards their locker room. It was the beginning of hell for the Midland Lee Rebel Football team.
We had been dreading this day ever since the season had ended. We didn’t make it to the playoffs for the second year in a row and our coach wasn’t happy about it. It was time for the dreaded Rebel Days offseason. Ten days of perfection was the goal for this offseason; all the members of the team give one hundred and…show more content… We were all very tired and since our weight room was like a giant garage, the temperature outside combined with all of us sweating and panting hard, made it feel like we were in an oven. We barely made it through the front squat station and finally arrived at the squats. Our final station faced us. The monster known as adversity was staring all of us dead in our face.
I was the first one up. I had three hundred and seventy five pounds on the bar. I was reaching my breaking point slowly with each repetition that I did. I finished my first set, just three more sets left. After I did my active recovery, I had to spot my partner. He had less weight than I did but he was dying just as bad as I was. He was barely holding up and I felt as if I was doing almost half of his weight because he was struggling so much.
“Second set!” our coach yelled; my turn under the bar again. I felt even weaker than before. My legs were on fire, ready to buckle in at any second. Repetition by repetition I struggled. My coach saw how much pain that I was in and stood right by me. He heard me yelling while I was under the bar and saw that I was about to give up. “You have to fight through the pain Flores! Push Harder! You have to want it! Be mentally tough! Mentally tough!” “I can do it, I can do it!” I told myself in my
