Cross-country claims another lover from running's friend zone
The toughest version of distance running is where the romance happens for most kids
If I were to focus my writing solely on cross-country running for the next couple of months, chronicling the major developmental threads in just a single state or NCAA conference could become a full-time newsletter job on its own. But for me, cross-country is the most absorbing discipline there is and the most challenging to satisfactorily describe to people who weren’t there. Every autumn, I always find one or two primary, limited narratives to track and get lost in.
As someone who still enjoys running every day and likes to test himself periodically—albeit more in theory than in practice—I find myself becoming more dialed into the feeling of purposeful running when fall rolls around and I gain an unconscious but persistent awareness that so many thousands of people, the tiniest sliver of whom I will ever know, are out there gearing up for longtime rivalries, the arrival of unanticipated new hot shots scuttling anticipated top-dog hierarchies, the beauty of everything falling in place for the underdog from a school with no track, and so on. When I head out on a Saturday morning in mid-October, aware that multi-race invitationals are going on all over the country at that moment, it broadens what I’m willing or eager to do that day, even if this never translates into the same solid data it has in the past. Warm feelings won’t turn the fact of a five-miler at seven-minute pace into 15:00 5K ability anymore, but the second part is someone else’s job now.
In recent weeks, buses from coast to coast loaded with cross-country runners have transported nervous ninth-graders, some of whom have never tried a sport, to the first races of their lives. At their first invitationals, these boys and girls just as agog on the starting line as I was at my first all-day, thirty-team meet in September 1984; despite the massive and transformative changes in technology since the early days of Chronomix, nothing really changes about the feeling in the air among a couple hundred kids tensed up on one side of a field, all of them experiencing their own version of a set of roiling sensations and thoughts no amount of money can ever buy. Thousands of freshmen boys are struggling to run seven-minute pace in their races right now, and are little better than puppies at the efficient distribution of race (and other) energy; in three years, a handful of these now-anonymous kids, who were tempted to walk up the first hill they experienced in a race, will be contending for state titles or become vital contributors to championship-caliber teams. Most of the rest will still be having fun; cross-country is as close to a “no kid left behind” sport at most schools as you’ll find, provided you ignore what happens in the races themselves.
In cross-country, even at peak fitness and lasered in on the task at hand, you’re never comfortable in a race from the moment it begins. Even on those magical days, unless you find yourself on a pancake-flat cross-country course with footing reminiscent of a road race, you don’t get to settle into a rhythm and just run to your ability level the way track races often allow. The pacesetter is whoever decides to hurt the most, and this ca be more effective in some settings than it ever is when grinding out flat laps on a synthetic surface. I’m convinced that anyone who’s ever gone really deep in a long cross-country race will find it almost impossible to experience the same level of desperation-crazed, somehow gleeful agony in any road race.
Last fall, I tracked the team I ran on in the eighties, the Concord (N.H.) boys, more closely than usual because the son of one of my Crimson Tide teammates was one of the best runners in school history, and I had been advising him for months, after COVID-19 knocked out the entire spring 2020 season. He has moved on to the America East conference, but Concord has won four state D-1 titles in a row, and this year they have a fantastic top three (which needs to learn to run more as a unit) but a big gap between their third and four-five runners, meaning it’s clear what needs to happen for Concord to stand at the top of the podium again: No serious injuries and some honest Sunday work for the guys currently flirting with 17:00 on standard courses.
Locally, Colorado, and specifically the Denver-Boulder metropolitan area, boasts some of the top teams in the nation. On the girls’ side, Cherry Creek was handed a #2 preseason U.S. ranking by Milesplit, but has already been beaten by #8 Arapahoe High. Valor Christian stands at #11, while 4A Niwot sits at #12 (the other three schools enjoy a 5A classification). For the boys, Cheyenne Mountain, also a 4A school, is ranked #2 nationally behind the best cross-country team in American history on paper, Newbury Park of California. Mountain Vista is right behind them at #3, while Niwot appears at #6. Scuttling this hierarchy is unranked Valor Christian’s defeat of Cheyenne Mountain at the Liberty Bell Invitational on Sept. 11.
There is so much talent within an hour’s drive of where I live that any weekend invitational in the area is likely to feature multiple returning and impending Foot Locker and NXN finalists. I think the folks at Milesplit and elsewhere consistently undersell the abilities of high-altitude kids despite vaguely attempting to account for the environment, but the results always tell the real story.
Finally, one of my two nephews decided to run cross-country as a college freshman this fall. He dabbled in running as early as the fifth grade, played other sports for a while, and returned to running late in high school, where he was physically a late bloomer. He never broke 20:00 on a 5K course, and even without the dings imposed by COVID-19, he never had anything close to sufficient guidance. But at some point, he became enamored of the process, and as a patient, sweet and studious kid, the idea of seeing how far he could push himself over a period of years attracted him. He put in some okay work over the summer, and in his first collegiate race, a hilly 5K on a hot day, he ran in the high 19’s. Then, in the first five-mile race of his life, he went through 5K in the 18:40s en route to managing 6:14 pace, meaning he ran by far the best race of his life despite inevitably leaving most of it on the first half of the course.
One of his coaches in someone I have known for a long time, whose own influence on my training and racing began in high school and lasts until this day. It’s the perfect arrangement, and my nephew knows this. He “liked” running before, but he’s never going to be able to look at it the same way again. It’s quite something when things snap into place as best as they ever can in a sport that is forever precarious but rewards raw, informed persistence like no other.
I am able to find pleasure in aspects of the sport that are purely incidental. For example, one tidbit from the U. Mass.-Dartmouth Invitational last weekend jumped out at me. As the results suggest, U. Mass.-Lowell, a D-1 team facing weakish D-3 competition, dumped its JV runners into the varsity race, one way to get a bunch of freshmen battle-tested. Consequently, its top eight ran the JV race, and as the results indicate, they didn’t hold back much, with Lowell’s top five cruising in together in 23:54-23:55.
That much is obvious at a glance. But I also noticed that in the varsity race, David Reynolds, a junior at Worcester Polytechnical Institute, took second place in 23:58. Reynolds ran for Merrimack Valley High School, which is in Concord (and far closer to my childhood home than Concord High is) but mostly serves five other towns to the north and east that are essentially gigantic farms. Reynolds was a 9:19 3,200-meter runner and a multi-time D-2 state champ, and has a twin brother named Matt who was never as fast, but who continues to run as David’s teammate at WPI. In the JV race, Matt was also “second” with a 26:14, although in reality he was ninth, being the first to cross the line after the entire Lowell octet entered in the race.
The take-home message today is that I will have less time for Netflix in the months to come and will probably be thinking of faraway places more than usual when I do my own runs, to the extent that scooter, raccoon, and rabbit traffic allow.