I’m one of those people who sees running for any extended amount
of time or distance as more of a chore than something to look
forward to or get excited about.
I’m one of those people who sees running for any extended amount of time or distance as more of a chore than something to look forward to or get excited about.
It just doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me.
I ran on the cross country team one year in grade school, a squad that was thrown together at the last minute and one that consisted of about five people from my eighth grade class of 12 students.
We had one meet the entire season and it was hell. We didn’t really train for the race as our twice-weekly practices usually consisted of 15 minutes worth of light running, followed by a pickup basketball game. We weren’t coached well, our course was shoddy at best and some of us were even running in our high tops left over from the basketball season, over the course of which we played a whopping seven games.
So when I crossed the finish line of the 3.1 mile course, some 30 minutes after the starting gun went off, with my lungs on fire and my legs going all Jell-o on me, I swore off cross country (and running in general) for good.
On Tuesday at Park Hill in Hollister, I was lucky enough to attend a very special cross country meet hosted by the Haybaler squad and attended by a pair of top-notch teams from California in Madera and North County, as well as by the Auckland Grammar School Distance Squad, a New Zealand team which features some of that country’s absolute best distance runners.
The kids had a great time. And the races were competitive, which was impressive in its own right considering the fact that the Hollister team was running on fumes Tuesday following last Saturday’s Stanford Invite and then a dual with Gilroy on Monday. Rigo Vasquez overtook strong runners from Madera and North County to finish closely behind the top two finishers from the Auckland team and set a new personal-best time on his home course in the process.
Amanda Boyd won again, if you can beleive it, jumping out to a quick lead over the rest of the pack and finishing the race all alone in first.
It was great. You could really see that everyone involved had a good time and the runners were having a lot of fun clowning around with each other and discussing their Park Hill tactics between the non-scoring races.
And, when it was over, a beaming Jess Morales, SBHS cross country coach, approached me with a big grin on his face and asked me if I was starting to understand what a great sport cross country is.
I think I’m getting there, coach.
Not since that sweltering day in Texas as an exhausted, wannabe runner in the eighth grade, had I even considered the dynamics of the sport. I like the fact that it’s not necessarily you against the person next to you. It’s you against the course, the terrain, the time you want to beat that’s burned itself into the forefront of your mind. It’s about pushing yourself to find whatever it takes to cross the finish line a second better than you did last time. The human-to-human competition almost seems secondary and that’s one of the biggest things I took away from Tuesday’s meet at Park Hill.
The sport lends itself to camaraderie and there’s nothing wrong with that.
