Meets of Champions, champions of meets
Meets of Champions, champions of meets
Also, is the No Fly List invitation-only?
The 2021 New Hampshire Cross-Country Meet of Champions last Saturday was a blast. It was also educational. While I was actively gathering instructions on how to properly contribute to NewHamphireCrossCountry.com webcasts and observing the technical steps involved in collecting video from various points on the course, I was also absorbing the meet in its entirety—racing teenagers hammering, pacing coaches yammering, spectators scampering, hopping, or limping about in search of the next optimal vantage point. On the fringes of the action, a scattered parade of mostly senior-age Mine Falls Park trail regulars and their dogs unwittingly found themselves seeing something unfold that is even more intensely special than it looks from the outside.
And even to the uninitiated, a statewide cross-country championship emits a curiously benevolent brand of hardcore competitive energy that invites people to stop to watch. Because on the ground, cross-country speaks a pure, universal, and magnificent language.
On the big day, the acreage encompassing a state-championship-level cross-country competition, no matter where it is or the nature of the layout, becomes something other than a park or a golf course. When the first gun goes off, the whole space within sight of the start-finish area is transmuted into something with its own temporary gravity and peculiar standards of operation. Even the rainiest or windiest or otherwise grimmest weather suddenly presents as ideal in context, in part because the kids plainly don’t care but also because all good coaches need to believe their teams have an advantage in sleet and slop. (For the record, conditions last Saturday were close to perfect.) And if you’re a proper weirdo, you understand that there is no better place to be for an hour or two than deep in the vortex of one of these mixed heaven-and-hell dramas, the first element coming from youngsters pushing through private barriers to redefine personal limits, the second arising from everything it takes from their bodies and minds to propel them there.
Ostensibly discordant cheers for athletes representing over two dozen competing schools ricocheting around the course create not the cacophony of senseless war, but a sweeping symphony of appreciation—for the splendor and grandeur of an honest but bloodless battle, one featuring the rare opportunity to emerge feeling like a winner even in literal defeat.
All this for the sake of a shared experience in solitary striving, because that feeling really does survive forever. Even if your knees or your feet or your teammates don’t. When the oldsters tramping around at these meets tell you this, kids, they mean it.
But despite the manifestly uncomplicated process of staging a footrace, the Meet of Champions is not quite the same event it was when I first attended it in the late 1980s as a competitor, in the mid-1990s as a newspaper reporter, in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a coach, and at various points up to the present as a spectator (and nominal 2021 commentator). I think I have been to about a dozen “Em Oh Cees” in all, spanning 37 years. All but two of these have been at Derryfield Park in Manchester, from which the event was moved down U.S. 3 to Mine Falls Park in Nashua after the 2004 season.
If you want basic information about what happened out there, and to see which teams and individuals qualified for tomorrow’s (Massachusetts-free as usual) New England Championships, you can watch the girls’ and boys’ races, scan the girls’ and boys’ results, and read great recaps of the girls’ and boys’ contests here.
If you want praise for the entire high-school scene in the Granite State, I can’t add really to what I’ve already written on Beck of the Pack about the phenomenal efforts of those involved. I could be biased, or maybe I just picked my friends in the running world wisely thirty-odd years ago and at numerous junctures since, because in an age in which tearing down institutions that others have built has become a national, spite-fueled pastime, these are the folks who are quietly building an already good youth New Hampshire running scene into an even better one, season after season and year after year.
But maybe it’s more interesting to ask questions, such as: What path has the sport taken in New Hampshire over the years, and what does that say about where it might be going or ought to go? And what can one infer about the transformation of cross-country as an athletic enterprise by comparing, say, the 1984 New Hampshire Meet of Champions to its 2021 descendant?
Perhaps it’s even better to start with: If you were around in the mid-1980s, and your main concern was building a better sport with stronger athletes, what about cross-country would you have changed? Was anything really “wrong”?
Unquestionably, a huge problem for New Hampshire coaches in those days was securing depth. Plenty of schools had two or even three very solid runners, yet such mortifying drop-offs thereafter that seemed to present an opportunity-lost scenario at two or three New Hampshire high schools every year, often some the largest ones. Some of that problem has been solved by a basic population increase; the state has about 25 percent more people than it did in the late 1980s, but five bodies are still enough to complete a scoring cross-country team. But most of the disappearance of thin, rudderless squads is owed to the advent of middle-school cross-country programs beginning in the mid-1990s, which not only began serving as feeder programs, but also gave a lot of previously bored or “I’m no good at sports” or plain old AD/HD-stricken kids an active, meaningful place to go.
The Meet of Champions is also a larger race than it was in the 1980s. Then, only twelve teams were invited—five from the D-1 state meet, four from D-2, and three from D-3. Today, those numbers are seven, six and five for a total of eighteen. This scales with the overall population increase in the state, but it never made much sense even in the old days to have a meet advancing as many teams to the New Englands (six) as it eliminates. And predictable advances in technology have made the big meets run more smoothly despite this increase in bodies. Did we* wait around a long time for results back then, even after state-championship races? Not really, but it was easy to foresee how automatic timing might work and how that would put people on warm, homeward-bound buses sooner.
Thanks to other technological advances, much of the mystery that once pervaded a meet like this is gone. In the 1980s and even beyond, it wasn’t uncommon to not even know what a top competitor from a small school even looked like until you saw him or her on the starting line, or later, at the Meet of Champions. That’s no longer even an option, and kids from different schools routinely communicate with each other between meets and in the off-season.
But the “feel” of a major race itself, from the inside, probably isn’t much different once the gun goes off. Kids are cognizant of their every move being literally photographed and videotaped for public consumption, but this is a generation that has never known anything but this kind of world, and seem broadly unbothered by what has always been normal to them in some sense.
I saw as many as a dozen folks in passing at the meet whose faces I recognized from way back, but whose names eluded me in the moment. I had the sense that a lot of those people were getting the same I-know-that-guy-but-not-lately vibe when they saw me. Rather than leading me into a “Whozzat?” attempted-recollection spiral, this gave me another clue that I was in just the right place at just the right time, surrounded by people whose presence and experience meant more in that moment than their names.
The pure language of cross-country.
My host whenever I travel to Concord, a high-school teammate who improbably went on to play a season of college baseball and is a thinking-jock to the core, always reminds me cross-country is a sport and that the only way to get the most out of your high-school athletes is to convince them winning is vitally important. The reason he’s a good envoy of this message is because it contradicts his entire persona; like me, he comes from a time when coaches hurling clipboards and throwing tantrums was de rigueur, but understands that there are a lot of ways to benignly trick kids into becoming far better than they ever thought they could be. I’m seeing a lot of this at work in the ways my coach-friends in New Hampshire—and elsewhere, actually—motivate their own kids. Part of this is emphasizing that you don’t compete against others in distance running, you compete with them. If you can’t see how this is consistent with doing whatever it takes within the rules to win, you haven’t thought hard enough about the variables.
Now that I am back in Boulder for at least the winter, excluding minor excursions, I can openly admit that I am a fallen and inept traveler, with zero practical chance of ever again becoming ept at self-relocation. It was not always so; I once enjoyed not only the experience of being on a plane and visually tracking my own progress out the window on a near-astronomical scale, but also being in airport itself. These places first struck me as undeclared theme parks, with the attractions being things like sets of parents trying desperately trying to shepherd their screaming kids to the other end of a long concourse before a plane departed without them, or a shambling drunk chick with a huge suitcase trying not to topple into a line of people from the top of a towering “down” escalator. (Consider: “Down” escalators in airports never de-escalate anything. At least one person always wants to stand in the middle of the belt, and that’s enough to cause simmering rage in at least one upstream mind.)
I now expect to suffer great psychological blows in any future trips across the country by air I decide to take. Some of this is the combination of having to wear a mask for twelve nearly uninterrupted hours and being reminded by human-like robot-voices and robot-like human voices every five minutes to do so. But it’s not just COVID-19 that has made me leery of conveying my decaying body and attitudes high in the sky over long distances. While I can manage to complete each step of a multi-stage, multi-modality journey (this time, OUT: walking, bus, planes, rental car, and BACK: rental car, planes, bus, friend’s car), I can’t do it without embracing the absolute worst ideas I have about myself and humankind and then fighting a war against myself to not inflict these on either the people around me or anyone who might be reachable via one of my portable electronic devices.
I think that my habit of traveling my myself is responsible for a great deal of this angst. Usually, having a friend present for such a journey serves as moderating influence on my mood even if I don’t feel compelled to blurt out every worry or complaint, and of course it provides a medium for conversations about more alluring subjects than the journey itself. Regardless, I think I might choose to drive next time, as this means not only being able take Rosie with me again, but avoiding the hassles and limitations of a rental car.
And I do intend to head back to New Hampshire, because four whole days there was not nearly enough. If I only hated being where I go as much as I detest the going and coming parts, I could just stay in one fuckin’ part of the country and leave the grousing about air travel to others. What a woe it is to feel meaningful things happening in your life in multiple places. I am unloved, if only by American Airlines.
While I was away in Concord-like places, I received guidance concerning my role in a collaborative artistic project that has been underway for months and perhaps a long winter away from completion. It is substantial, dealing with unexplored connections in local running history. This will consume more of my time in the weeks and months to come, which means I may limit my output to about a post every three days. Most of you have a tough time keeping up with my stuff anyway, given that there are other things to read and do in your lives. But I will be riding the momentum of my experiences last week for a while, and I’m glad this second-hand joyride reliably rolls around every fall.