Loss

For this past week's weekly letter assignment, we were told to write about one time we experineced loss and how we coped with it afterwards. 

Last year, when I was a novice rower, one of the the few races we lost was at regionals.  Regionals was supposed to be the time we took home the most important gold medal.  We were pretty much undefeated so far in the season but when we got to regionals everything was different.  The stakes were higher, the conditions were pretty bad, and the course was unfamiliar.  Most of the race went by in sort of a blur, but I remember how defeated we felt afterwards.  We had put every last drop of energy into this race and we didn't even place.  We were so disappointed.  But once regionals were over and we had time to discuss, we realized there was nothing we could have done differently.  We had trained just the way we were supposed to.  We gave the race everything we had.  But outside forces had been against us too, we had gotten the windiest lane and our coxswain was not very good either.  And ever since then, we have all trained just as hard, if not harder, for the upcoming races.  Although at the time we were not happy, everything turned out pretty well in the end.