All of the N.H. Cross-Country Divisional State Meets pre-livestream previews, reviews, analyses and predictions, explained in words and numbers
Despite its organic nature, distance running has perhaps changed even more for young runners since the '80s and '90s than the rest of the world.
***BIG MEET TOMORROW***
New Hampshire has managed via a little luck— it’s a small state with few known permanent residents — and a colossal effort on the part of a number of key individuals to play host to a legitimate high-school cross-country season this fall. (In my day, virtually no one would have gotten sick from this virus because bats were not a delicacy and folks still had hardy immune systems.) While the schedule has been unconventional and the meets spectator-free, tomorrow (Saturday), on the usual weekend on the usual course in Manchester, the six divisional state meets will be held. Starting at 9 a.m. Eastern, the girls’ and boys’ D1, D2 and D3 races will be livestreamed here, the YouTube presence of NewHampshireCrossCountry.com.
According to sources, three-fourths of you won’t get a chance read this before the races start because of the late posting, and 40 percent of you will be on-site anyway either as coaches or, to coin a term, bandit-spectators; but you can still watch the race videos later and pretend you’re watching them live. Chances are excellent that ESPN et al. won’t be unfurling any real-time updates about the races, so the odds of your viewing being accidentally scuttled by spoilers is roughly 1 in 119. (Back in my day, you just went wherever you want to watch things and flipped the bird to adults who objected.)
Most states end their cross-country seasons with a championship like tomorrow’s, wherein “state” titles are awarded to the top schools in each division. A few, New Hampshire among them, end with a gratifying face-off that pits all of the top teams and individuals in the state against each other. In New Hampshire, this is called the Meet of Champions, and in the past, its main purpose was to qualify teams and individuals for the "New Englands” the following weekend, with team plaques not awarded. It has since become a team championship in its own right, and despite the “New Englands” being canceled this fall, the Meet of Champions will take place on Nov. 7 at Mine Falls Park in Nashua, where it has been staged since 2005. (Back in my day, we had to run somewhat well at Derryfield on back-to-back weekends to get to the damn “New Englands.” The thing in Nashua is a pancake.)
***NICE SITE ALERT***
One of those blue text strings above takes you to a “meet hub” where you can see the key features of the site, including a once-per-week “rankings reveal” where glib and jovial representatives of different teams pick the top ten boys’ and girls’ teams. I’ll save most of my description of — and praise for — the New Hampshire Cross-Country site and its operatives for one of the two unprecedentedly major stories about the 2020 N.H. season I’ll soon be filing on a serious outlet available anywhere the Internet is sold. But as time is short, I have to point out what will be obvious to you within seconds of exploring the site: It very systematically accounts for the unavoidable pitfalls of putting a major component of a bunch of teenagers’ lives online for all to see and potentially snark at. The folks who run the site’s main machinery it are career educators, so it’s no surprise they have gotten it so right.
***THEN AND NOW***
Still, some of the great stuff — and I’m talking more here about databases like those Milesplit and TFRRS maintain — is sometimes I’ve often thought how unruly it would have been for all of my race results to be available almost immediately for everyone to see. Something tells me that, back in my day, I’d have obsessed over the stinkers, even though, on balance, my best results were at approximately the best times, though that kind of unraveled in my last year of cross.
But more than quasi-privacy concerns, I think that even though the Internet has given a tremendous overall boost to U.S. scholastic distance running, I much preferred not quite knowing what to expect of the competition when I got to a race, especially in early-season meets. (Granted, it’s easy to say this now in the absence of a 1987 choice.) I might have heard unsubstantiated rumors about, say, some 16-flat 5K on a course in an undetermined area code, but these didn’t even rise to the level of added incentive. It became clear throughout every season who the guys to watch out for were and how they were likely to behave at Derryfield Park, but there were always X-factors. Sometimes, you might not know that a rival was missing one of its key runners owing to injury or incarceration until the morning of an event — or, just as often, until the results were announced. This was kind of like being able to get away with unintentionally kneecapping a kid at the two-mile mark and getting away with it, to the extent that “unintentionally kneecapping” holds up here despite its absurdity.
I was friends with some, maybe most, of my top rivals, even and especially members of Concord’s number-one perennial rival Pinkerton Academy, enough so that I spent weekends at their houses in the off-season…and maybe during indoor track. All of us were better for this camaraderie (I don’t mean my visits to Derry in particular, though these were being called epic and a paradigm shift before those were even a common descriptors). We respected each other’s triumphs even when they represented personal tragedies.
I admit that I relished the mystery of reading about the winners of other divisions in the paper the morning after the divisional meets, kids from the Dead Pecker Ridge portions of the state who’d be my top rivals at the following Saturday’s Meet of Champions, and in many cases having no idea what they looked like and in fact no clue what colors their school uniforms were. One kid from Berlin had a full beard, which added understandable hilarity to his consistent 21-minute performances. Concord, technically part of the extended Boston metro area, seemed a lot farther from the tiny towns near the Canadian border than they do today, although there’s still no practical reason to head up there other than for snowmobiling and observing what Alabama would look like if it had a severe winter. (Back in my day, people strode casually back and forth across the N.H.-Quebec border with trash bags full of marijuana slung over their shoulders, perhaps whistling a happy woodsman tune, albeit not at official U.S. Customs checkpoints.)
I’ll try to make this paragraph the central point of the post: Take the pressure today’s high-schoolers face compared to pre-Internet days (and yeah, it’s all they’ve known, but still) and add in COVID-19 and the wave starts and social-distancing requirements and an enforced absence of spectators and improvisational day-to-day school lives that make little sense, and the focus these kids have showed this fall is a model for every adult whiner, myself included, to shoot for, now and in any times of uncertainty and duress. It also helps to know that New Hampshire’s top teams, D2 Coe-Brown Academy and D1 Concord, have some unusually nice kids on them, with excellent mentors.
***PREDICTION PART***
The D1 race has been diluted by the unfortunate withdrawal of Pinkerton from the event a couple of weeks ago thanks to COVID cases within the school community, not surprising given the enrollment of about 3,000. Earlier this week, the same fate befell Keene, too late to make the New Ham…OK, I’m just writing NHXC even though that’s ad hoc, because you can tell I hate typing extra words. Keene’s team wouldn’t have challenged Concord, but junior Torin Kindopp would have contended for the overall win. Pinkerton couldn’t have challenged Concord either, but had two guys who might have had a shot at the title as well. This leaves the runner who would have been the prohibitive favorite anyway, Eben Bragg, with little real competition tomorrow outside of his teammate Brayden Kearns. These two have been training and racing together since various preschoolers of today were mere blastocysts, and if Concord wins tomorrow, it will make four D1 titles in four years for the two of them.
Londonderry probably has the best chance to beat Concord if the Tide stumbles, or, more realistically, if the entire Concord team shows up having brought no footwear other than shitkicker boots. The Lancers also have a pair of runners Bragg has been racing against since the Obama administration who could challenge him in Manchester and — in doing him a favor — are likely to take it out hard. But if conditions are fair-to-good, given Concord’s depth and the general malaise of D1 this fall even before the COVID casualties, I’ll be surprised if Concord scores more than 40 points tomorrow, with the over-under officially pegged at 37. It’s supposed to be about 30 degrees American and clear when the D1 boys go off at 9:50 — not ideal, but not necessarily prohibitive. Also, Eben has a stated, and probably genetic, predilection for racing in cold weather. His dad was, back in our mutual day, my best friend, and moreover was famed for roaming the countryside balls-naked or very close to that state in all manner of wintry conditions, with one ski pole held defiantly aloft, and has probably renewed this practice since the recent death of his hero, Eddie van Halen, despite now being a teacher in the Concord system. He may, despite the season and his age, even have chosen to top off the highest portion of the Sewalls Falls Bridge into the Merrimack River, where in 1984 someone was known to have spray-painted "MIGHT AS WELL JUMP” on a rusty cross-beam to commemorate the supergroup’s recent release.
Eben, despite the obstacle of no good music to listen to, has a real chance to run under 15:40. If he does this at Derryfield, he’ll be in great company. He’s already run under 16:00 (by himself, though that’s perhaps self-evident) twice this season, and knows exactly what he needs to do on the course and when. He can time-trial with panache, as he did progression runs in the summer of up to 8K on the track, also alone. And he is well aware that in 1994, John Mortimer and Matt Downin ran 15:24 and 15:30 at this meet en route to taking the top two places at the Foot Locker National Championship, in the reverse order. (How they ran so much faster at Balboa Park remains a mystery. Despite suffering on the hills of Derryfield myself many times, I maintain that it’s just not that hard, or slow, if you run it with a plan than doesn’t include sprinting up the opening hill.) Kearns also has a shot at 16:00, and a kid from Dover, Tyler Sheedy, may be up there, too.
I have little to add about the other races that anyone else couldn’t — Coe-Brown will probably put its top seven in the top dozen of the D2 race, and will probably manage an aggregate top-five time of around 16:10-16:15. Coe-Brown hasn’t raced at Derryfield this year, but that’s about all that could “hurt” them. I expect Concord to give them a target in that area with something like a 16:30, with a much greater spread.
Watch the races if you can. Endless praise and thanks to the people who do the relentless work to make these meets happen, so I don’t have to rot away even more quickly, although, I have to say that back in my day, no one my age ran as much as I do now, at least not while looking as effortless and pleased with myself as I do almost all of the time, and without carrying any known stolen property except for all of your hearts.