My most memorable experience in 2020 happened in early June. My sister took me and two of my friends, who she was babysitting, to a forest near my house. We started our hike utterly unprepared for what was to come. We had no water, and one of my friends was wearing pants. As soon as we started walking through the woods, I could feel the sun beating down on my skin, even under the cover of trees. I could feel my skin start to burn. Sweat trickled down my face into my eye. The humidity that comes with living in Mississippi, did not help with the heat. My shoes kept getting stuck in the soggy ground and every time I took a step a gross squish noise would happen. Some mud got inside of my shoe, which only worsened the experience. The mud in my shoe felt like jello with sticks and sand in it. The hike was turning out to be a bust, seeing how hot and sticky everything was, but then I saw something. 

At first, I thought I might just be hallucinating but I wasn’t. There was pearly white sand in the distance. As my group and I got closer I started to see more of the sand. We had stumbled onto a beach! I raced towards the beach. Normally, a beach wouldn’t be a big deal, but because of the heat and my boredom, the sand was a sight to behold. The pearly white powdery sand practically called my name. Based on our location, I knew that the beach was located on the Pearl River. Its brown and muddy waters looked very fun and exciting, and my first thought was that we could go swimming. That idea quickly went away once I realized that none of us had any sort of swimwear and that the Pearl River has a lot of harmful bacteria that make it bad for swimming. I wanted to play in the water because of the heat, but I knew that we couldn’t go swimming. However, my second idea solved this problem. We could play on the beach and just put our feet in the water. My sister and my friends agreed to this idea, so I took off my mud-soaked shoes and socks and ran into the water. My friends followed. As soon as my feet hit the water a chill ran down my spine and I got goosebumps. The water felt freezing. We played in the water until my feet started to prune. I felt refreshed and had forgotten about the heat. The walk home was not nearly as miserable and boring as it was on the way to the beach. I felt stupid for thinking that the hike was long, as it was only 20 minutes to get to the beach, but the heat made every minute feel like an hour.

With 2021 arriving, I can’t help but look towards the future and what I plan to do in the rest of this year. My resolutions for this year are to get better at soccer, make myself healthier, and get faster.  I’ve always wanted to improve my skills and my stamina, so I intend to increase the number of hours I spend practicing a week. This will be difficult to schedule due to other sports. I think that teaching myself to get faster would help me improve all the sports I play, and it would help me improve my personal health and wellness too. This year I want to practice running outside of sports practice for at least 5 hours per week, but I need to work myself up to this. I will start with at least one extra run per week and continue increasing until I have met my goal. I will also make sure to eat healthily and get enough sleep. These are my goals/resolutions for 2021.