Personal Narrative Analysis

I have always been driven by competition, my will against that of my opponent my work ethic against his. Competition is the basis of who I am and failure does not come naturally to me. I refuse to back down in the face of a challenge, and so when I was asked if I wanted to do wrestling in seventh grade, I accepted just as I had accepted every challenge prior. I knew what I was getting into I knew the hard work that would be required and I knew the toughness of the practice. But nothing had prepared me for the level of competition even at the middle school level, that competition only drove me to push myself more and excel more. I worked myself as hard as I could from seventh grade all the way until junior year. I competed as hard as I could and although I did lose in several

Now I was the favorite, I was the person who if I lost would have “thrown it away”. However nothing changed, I continued my relentless training regime confident it would lead me to victory as it had before. The season passed by and I found myself the favorite to win division two states. I reached the final and stepped onto the mat to face the second ranked wrestler in the state, behind me, we battled for three grueling periods. Here was where it would all come together, I would be victorious and walk out the winner, however something happened, he managed to take me down with seconds left and win the match by one point. I was devastated, I had failed, there was no coming back from this I thought; I had failed in other things but never in such a huge moment, never in something that I was so confident in. I sat and considered what had happened, I knew it was not from a lack of work ethic on my part and it was certainly not because he was better than I. One small error in the final seconds had cost me the biggest match of my high school wrestling