'I realized I was really going to the Olympics': Young woman turns dream into reality

'When I crossed the finish line in Eugene a few weeks ago, it was sort of like disbelief.'

Dreams really come true for 22-year-old Morolake Akinosun, who took to Twitter five years ago to claim she would graduate from school and be in the Olympics.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Akinosun released a Tweet on Sunday, five years after her initial Olympics post, reading: "It's 2016. I graduated from Texas in December. I'm going to the Olympics next week."

According to BuzzFeed, Akinosun said she released the first tweet after watching the World Championships for Track and Field.

"Watching it may have inspired me to tweet that," she admitted.

Akinosun grew up in Illinois and said, "it was more of a dream and an inspiration. A goal has to be somewhat realistic. I wasn't on that level yet and I didn't know for sure that I would ever get there, but I for sure wanted to get there."

She worked hard as a runner and appeared in Eugene, Oregon for the Olympic trials, which earned her a place on the US 4x100-meter relay in Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympics.

"When I crossed the finish line in Eugene a few weeks ago, it was sort of like disbelief...and then I realized I was really going to the Olympics and I started crying."

Through her joy and the passage of time, Akinosun completely forgot the tweet - until it appeared on her Timehop App, which reminds site users of posts they made in the past.

"A few days ago on Timehop, the tweet came up," she explained. "And I just thought to myself, 'This is crazy.'"

After retweeting the message with the second, the internet took over and made it viral.

"I had no idea the tweet was going to become this big," Akinosun admitted after noticing it had been shared over 180 thousand times and had received 340 "hearts."

Her single most important piece of advice is "believe in yourself," Akinosun stated. "In 2011, I truly believed this was a goal of mine, and I dreamed big, and I was able to achieve my dream.

"It wasn't always easy and no one knows the work that I put in the 5 years in between the two tweets. I put in a lot, a lot, a lot of hard work over the course of the 5 years and I went after my dream. So if you have a dream, I want to encourage girls to go ahead and go after it, no matter how big it is, no matter how many people think your dream is unachievable. It's yours - go for it."

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