Drawing in a puff of air, Winnie Li (12) presses her fingertips to the rutty rubber track and sets her spike-adorned feet into the blocks. As the sound of a gunshot pierces her ears, Winnie charges towards the set of hurdles, the balls of her feet digging into the rubber surface. Propelling herself across the first hurdle, her first leg soars across the bar.

That race in her junior year track season is one that she can still remember in detail, and changed her life in more than a physical way.

“My lead leg sailed over, but my trail caught on the board and before I know it I was going down, face first into the track,” Winnie said. “I broke my femur back in March, and it was a really big deal because I couldn’t walk for about four months. I had to use a wheelchair, crutches, then a cane. It took me half a year before I was even allowed to run anymore.”

Following her injury, Winnie spent months recovering and eating healthy in order to build up her strength to walk again.

“It was a tough time during my recovery period, I couldn’t do anything by myself,” she said. “Often young people throw away their health by eating junk food or sleeping late. But while I was recovering, I wanted so badly to just walk—something that almost everyone can do, and something people often take for granted—I wanted to do that so bad, and I couldn’t.”

While Winnie was still training, she learned how to conquer hurdles with power.

“My coaches used to tell me to do things in threes: a jump to kickstart the muscles, another to get them running, building toward the third and most powerful, the burst that will propel me off the starting blocks at top speed,” Winnie said. “It’s that power that makes a hurdler at her fastest when she reaches the first hurdle. It also makes the first hurdle the most dangerous place to fall down.”

Despite not being able to continue as a hurdler, Winnie’s experiences allow her to approach life with the same confidence that she approached the 33-inch obstacles on the track.

“Even though the fall was terrifying, I have a deeper sense of my own strength than ever before. Though I may no longer be a hurdler in the literal sense, the principles of the hurdler continue to guide me,” she said. “The best part is that I’m way less afraid of the obstacles that will inevitably rise before me, because breaking the biggest hardest bone in my body didn’t break me. I’m still a hurdler.”