Undergraduate / Pursuit for a ribbon. Common-App essay revision/quality? [3]

This is my current version of My Common App essay for college. Let me know any suggestions towards editing it! Much appreciated!

The lessons we take from failure can be fundamental to later success. Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

My legs are beginning to go numb and my breathing has turned into gasping, but I must keep running. The finish line is approaching and there is one person who stands in between me and receiving a ribbon, I must catch him. The closer the finish line gets the closer I am to collapsing from exhaustion, and it seems no matter how hard I try I can't make my body go any faster, but I must push. Winning a ribbon would be worth the pain I was putting my body through, I must have something to show for it. With every step I am gaining on him and within seconds am running right beside him, I must beat him. We crossed the finish line at what seemed to be the same time, and the doubt begins to set in on whether or not it had been enough. They begin calling up top finishers to receive their ribbon and my name was not one of them. People are cheering for the runners' accomplishment but all I can think of is how close I was. The race replayed in my head as I reflected on what I could have done better, what I could have done differently to change the outcome of the race. Maybe if I had ran faster on the downhill, or kicked earlier to the finish, but no matter what the race was over and I couldn't change it. My confidence as a first time Cross Country runner plummeted and I had no idea how to get better. I felt helpless. But the more I thought about the race the more I realized that the only way I would succeed in Cross Country, was if I trained harder than my competition. That to win would take dedication and constant resilience to overcome any adversity. When I arrived at home I took the number pinned to my Cross Country jersey from the race and put it on my wall, as a constant reminder that to succeed, would take more than just natural ability. As I increased the effort I put into training the results began to show, I was competing at a higher level and getting faster with every race. Whenever I began to doubt whether all the hard work was worth it or not, I looked on my wall and remembered how I felt that day. Dedication was the key to my success.

I realized that this method could be applied to activities other than just Cross Country. As the school year progressed the concepts progressively got more and more in depth. Students would raise their hands constantly to ask a question about quantum mechanics or how the integral of a function is equal to the area under the curve. Concepts that were simply difficult to understand at a first glance, I began to comprehend with increased ease. Instead of moving onto the next lesson with no prior knowledge of the last chapter, I understood and was capable of applying the information we had just learned to our next unit, and it all began to click. Lesson after lesson the concepts piled on but because I had spent extra time on it, it came a lot easier to me than my fellow classmates. Soon I was getting questions asking to explain the homework or after being handed back our graded tests, asked to compare answers to see why they may have gotten it wrong. School was becoming easier for me, and it was all thanks to Cross Country, more specifically, my failure. That day I realized that to get anywhere in life, it would take more than natural ability or intelligence. The failure I experienced that race would teach me it would take determination and drive to succeed. Failure is disappointing, but every failure in life can be a lesson learned.