When entering Mississippi State University’s campus from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Drive, one landmark in particular stands out. To the right, just before the major buildings on campus begin to pop up, sits Chadwick Lake.
This staple of campus has been responsible for the upholding of my sanity throughout my first year of college, but maybe the best place to start is at the beginning.
The pandemic that rocked the world in March 2020 impacted people on a million different fronts, but for most people, the most memorable part of lockdown is the feeling of confinement.
My family was obviously no exception. I found myself picking fights with my sister as a form of entertainment once I felt Netflix had nothing to offer. It was then that my mother suggested I take a couple laps around the neighborhood in the sleek new Ford Escape that they had just bought for my first car.
I was fifteen and only held a learner’s permit; I jumped at the idea of side-stepping the law, even if it was just for a 15-minute drive around the subdivision.
Fast forward two and a half years later as I began my freshman year at Mississippi State. College itself is an experience marked by the exposure to new ideas, responsibilities and stressors. While it may not resemble the pandemic in any obvious way, there are a few similarities I found between it and an ordinary freshman year of college.
College is a marathon. Even though there is an end date set, there are a great number of moments where it feels like graduation may never come. The pandemic might not have had a tentative graduation date, but it did drag on and on with no end in sight.
This leads to the oh-so-familiar feeling of dread that plagues every college student. That feeling builds like no other while the assignments rack up in Canvas. With every ding of a notification, the molehill slowly grows into a mountain and the to-do list gets harder to tackle.
In fact, 80% of all college students can admit to being overwhelmed, with 40% stating that it affected their ability to function, according to the National College Health Assessment.
This brings us back to the neighborhood laps, which my mom eventually dubbed “sanity laps.” The appeal of the laps during quarantine was that it allowed an escape from the world around me.
The world is usually always on fire in some way or another, but this was especially true in 2020.
Not that I would compare my freshman year of college to the dumpster fire that was 2020, but it was a period of great change that left me with reeling with feelings of overwhelming responsibilities and expectations.
A couple months into this first year of college, I decided to bring back the laps in a different way. I walked the 15 minutes to Chadwick Lake and decided to walk around the track until life felt conquerable again. After a couple of turns around the lake, I returned to the dorm and tackled my to-do list with a new fervor.
This strategy is rooted in science. Primary care physician Dr. Indumathi Bendi claims that “carrying out routine activities reduces stress by making the situation appear more controllable and predictable.”
Chadwick Lake boasts a one-mile walking track around the water’s edge. This concrete path has seen the bottoms of thousands of shoes belonging to both students and Starkville residents. Every tenth of a mile, a convenient brick marker alerts the pedestrians to the mileage covered.
The walking track around the lake was first built in 2013. A press release for the new track hoped that the track would “help promote a healthier culture for the community and provide a convenient, beautiful setting for people to enjoy exercise.”
This has been the setting of numerous sanity laps over the course of the past year. I have witnessed fishing, games of frisbee, kayaking and picnics all take place. As one enters this sanctuary, all the stress, deadlines and assignments fall away.
When life seems to be hurling some new set of challenges every minute, it is essential to take comfort in the smaller things. A simple walk around the lake could end up being the final push of motivation needed to triumph over these perils of early adulthood.
Also, the walking track promotes some killer calf muscles.
The trail was opened in 2013 after a grant was awarded to the university from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Mississippi Foundation.
