Hannah Palmer has had some unexpected bumps in the road, and she is working through them with a smile on her face. Palmer has a passion for cross country, starting with her sister.
The transition from middle to high school can be tough sometimes, and Palmer did that at the same time as she moved across the country from Utah.
“It was a little scary, because all the sudden, like everyone there is a lot older, but it was pretty fun,” Palmer said.
Palmer has dealt with a lot of transitions with her now having to navigate through changes in cross country too. There are a lot of challenges that come with running cross country, and head coach Kim Martin knows how to deal with those challenges.
“The biggest challenge is usually mental, because physically, pretty much almost anybody can do it,” Martin said. “It’s just you have to have the mindset to do something that is uncomfortable, and then to be good at it, you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.”
The mental challenge isn’t what stopped Palmer, she got injured right before the season started and it was devastating to hear the news. That wasn’t going to stop her though, and even though it set her back some, Palmer wasn’t going to let it affect her.
“I was on my way to be a varsity runner, like I made the team and everything, but it made it so I couldn’t run for about a month,” Palmer said.
Palmer is quickly recovering, still making sure she is careful with the exercises and things she does. Even though Palmer isn’t on varsity right now, she is still going to make great achievements and be an important part of the team.
“So I think as we get her back and healthy, that she will be an athlete who works really hard, who is going to always perform the best that she can, because she’s going to lay it all out every time she runs,” Martin said.
According to Martin, Palmer is a hard worker and puts effort into every run.
“I think she could be successful in her future [with cross country]. By her senior year, she is going to be really fast, and if she wants to run in college, that is probably, you know, a direction she could go, just because she’s such a hard worker that she’ll be able to achieve anything she wants to achieve,” Martin said.
