Luis Soto Parra '24 Recruiting Profile

Running wasn't worth more than tamales when I was 7.

"Vamonos!"

"Why can't we just eat breakfast before we run?"

"Everything in this life must be earned. Even food."

"But Grandpa!"

"Vamonos!"

The only thing that mattered on our morning runs through the forest of Tlalpan in Mexico City were the tamales we would buy on the way home. When I was little, I didn't see the importance of the trek itself, much less being in my grandfather's company since he'd always be healthy, right? Now, I realize I would give up all the tamales I've ever eaten to run with him one more time.

Sweat trickles down my cold face as I approach the 5th kilometer in one of my last races on the Cross Country team. I see the dark, gray sky, evergreen pines, wet boulders, and shiny concrete paths. You have to start your "final kick" before you see the finish line, even when it's not visible. You need energy, a particular type of energy that is more psychological than physical, to reach your goal.

The rhythm of my feet pounding the concrete below me synchronizes with my breath and that of the runners around me. My mind races through a myriad of my favorite music: "My Shot" from the Hamilton soundtrack: Not throwing away my shot. I pass one runner. "All the Way Live" from the Spiderman soundtrack: I feel the bass in my chest, the drumline keeping me at pace like a metronome, the synth-wave chords firing neurons in my mind, triggering a surge at the last 800 meters. I pass three runners. Finally, my latest piano composition, etched in my mind through countless iterations on the school band piano, at a long-term care facility, and on my very own piano: my fingers race through octaves and crescendos on its 88-toothed smile as the crowd becomes louder and louder. I play with the end in mind.

Composing music allows me to artistically journal moments in which I feel profoundly excited, sad, and frustrated. When I think of music as I run, I let all those emotions out-emotions tracing back to my desire of racing beside my grandfather in Mexico one more time. But I don’t just run for the past and the present, but my future patients I hope to help as a physician. If I run a little bit harder, I can train my mind with the mental fortitude I'll need as a surgeon to save them.

With each stride, I see trees swooshing beside me and imagine their branches as arteries with oxygenated blood traveling to depleted muscles. I visualize the lung's bronchioles, gas exchange occurring between red blood cells and tissue. I pay my respects to acetylcholine, my favorite little neurotransmitter, moving through the array of nervous tissue, resiliently helping my cells contract amidst the mitochondria's oxygen depletion during the grotesque 5k. As the necklace around my neck pounds my chest as if it were my heart, I pass four runners.

This necklace is engraved with a maze surrounding a stick figure, representing the decades-long journey ahead to become a cardiothoracic surgeon and researcher. I chase this goal because of my entire family’s history with heart conditions, especially my grandfather’s, and a shadowing experience I had two summers ago with my grandfather's cardiac surgeon at the very hospital where I was born.

Music and physiology are transcendent powers. Understanding them allows me to store memories of events and people in their fingers, save lives, and run down eight runners in the last kilometer of a race. They are not just my psychological fuel, interest, or way of pushing my intellectual, emotional, social, and physical limits. They are the reason for which I live. They are the reason for which I move with purpose.