Over the past three years, there have been an average of 985 international students who attend USF. With people coming in from the other five continents, students are bound to have some difficulties when coming to San Francisco. One of these students is sophomore history major Herbie Johnson.
Johnson is from St. Albans, England and currently runs for the track-and-field team along with the cross-country team. However, Johnson had other aspirations growing up. Johnson said, “I definitely adopted track and field a lot later than most. Most kids in the UK grow up wanting to be a football player. I was the exact same until I’d say the end of middle school. I didn’t necessarily think I was going to become a footballer, but I would much rather take that over doing track and field. But then I realized, oh, actually I’m quite good at this whole running thing and I started properly training.”
Johnson’s appreciation of the sport came at an unexpected time. He said, “Whilst I was playing football at the youth level, I ran something called the Park Run. It’s literally just a 5K on a Saturday and it gets you out of the house. It’s a really cool community event. At one of these park runs, there was a lady who beat me who was a part of Luton Athletics Club, which is my home club. She came up to me after the race and was like, you know, for a kid your age, you’re pretty good. Have you ever gone to a track? Have you ever, like, done a session? Have you ever done this before? I said, no, I’ve never really considered it. She was like, oh, you should come down and train with us. I was like, you know what, fine, let’s give it a go. I met a couple mates that were my age there, and from that point on, I was like, you know, I’m just way better at track and field than I was playing football. So I gave up playing football and decided that I’ll do track and field from here on out. I think that’s sort of what got me into it; it was literally just by pure luck.”
Johnson recently had an amazing performance in cross-country for the university. On Sept. 4 at the USF Invitational, he managed to get second place in the 8K with a time of 23 minutes and 56 seconds. This is amazing, as he was a mere four seconds shy of taking home first place. Johnson reflects on this incredible achievement by saying, “I think it’s a really good confidence booster for the rest of the season. It’s definitely going to be helpful for some races when it gets into conference, then into regionals and then hopefully helping USF try and compete for a conference title. I mean, there was just so much positivity from my coach. You can’t really get too mad at a second place finish. I mean, we had a little talk about it at the end on a couple things I could have done differently that maybe could have won me the race, but at the end of the day, it was a really great race overall.”
Johnson also notes some of the difficulties that come with moving from the UK to the US. Johnson said, “I think on a personal level, maintaining relationships from back home is one of the biggest difficulties for sure. Since there is an eight-hour time difference, trying to make sure I’m calling my parents enough and maintaining relationships with my friends is definitely a struggle for me. I’ve also got a long-distance girlfriend as well, so maintaining relationships to me has definitely gotten a lot harder since I moved here, but it’s something I keep trying to do. I don’t want to lose those connections that I’ve made back home because they’ve been in the making for 18, 19 years.”
Johnson’s mentality has always been to keep going and never give up. This is something that he wants to be echoed among all students here at USF, saying, “Just keep going. No matter what walk of life you’re from, no matter what you’re doing at this university, if you’re a nursing student, if you’re doing law, just keep going, keep working at it. You’ve gotten into college and you’ve gotten into a good university with a program that you probably quite care about. It’s probably something you’ll want to do the rest of your life. If you’ve gotten to this point, why would you give up now? Just keep going and as long as you keep putting in the effort and putting in the hours, it’ll work out for you.”
Johnson shows that through hard work and persistence, you can overcome anything. Whatever you set your mind to is what you should put 100% of your effort into. Even when there’s times when you want to give up, with some positive self-talk, you can accomplish just about anything. Johnson’s plan is to graduate and hopefully race at the professional level under a big name like Nike or Adidas. He says that it would be the ideal plan for the future and that he tends to work harder and harder everyday so that this plan can come to fruition.
