New Hampshire cross-crack: New rules, new events, new records

The end of a running season is vitally different from other sports. Some Granite State workhorses made hay of this, plus at least one other cliché.

I was thinking the other day that “I was thinking the other day that” is unnecessary in any writing context. Despite this, I’ve probably opened a lot of sentences, even whole blog posts, with this superfluous clause. If the material that follows the garbage-phrase is useful, it doesn’t matter when that material occurred to the writer or even whether the thoughts were original; just assert whatever the fuck it is you plan to say, and dispense of the trite, egoistic garnish.

I was also thinking, either right before that or right afterward, that the end of a successful distance-running season is different from that in other sports in two important, complementary ways. The first is that runners often get to choose when a season is actually over, and the second is that they can usually conclude with a high degree of confidence if this is a good idea or not.

Early in 2020 New Hampshire Meet of Champions girls’ race.

Start with the accustomed, pandemic-free scenario. If you’re a superstar player on a great basketball team, your true season eventually ends, even if you wind up on contrived “all-star” teams in the spring. Even you’re on an unprecedented personal roll, you have to wait a while to suit up. Also, a “roll” in basketball is harder to statistically quantify; a forward can score 20, 14 and 30 points in consecutive games, with 12, 17 and 5 assists, and after adding in defensive stats like steals and blocks, it’s impossible to discern any useful trend in overall play. That forward might “know” they’re going to light it up at both ends of the court next time, but there’s no way to predict the pattern of the grand numerical splatter. (I don’t really like the new editorial convention of “they” for singular personal pronouns, not because I’m against kneeling before the raging inclusivity police, but because I spent years being told by knowledgeable editors and style guides to avoid exactly this construct. This seems less than a life- or even career-threatening problem, but important enough to point out since I’m a known, albeit grossly imperfect, pedant.) Not only that, the end of a hot streak itself is unpredictable, as, contra endurance sports, it depends on a lot more than the player’s skills and fitness.

This same basic principle applies to most other team sports. The ones that escape this banality are those including timed or measured events using standardized distances (and often, surfaces or aqueous media): Track and field/cross-country, swimming, and cycling come to mind. Most high schools don’t feature the latter two, so that leaves people who run, jump and throw things, and in the fall, that gets narrowed down to runners.

In a normal fall, after a regional- or national-caliber talent is done with in-state competition, that runner and their coach, even if both are clueless, can usually determine with relative ease whether that runner is on an upward trajectory and has one or two more good races left or whether it’s time to pack it in. While times aren’t everything in cross-country, these and how an athlete merely looks on the course tell as much as you need to know for planning purposes. If it looks like more improvement is likely, it’s off to one of the postseason galas, at the athlete’s discretion; if not, there’s indoor track (or, if you have the option, some combination of Nordic skiing and the preparation of methamphetamine in a backyard shed in northernmost Maine).

Really good runners, of course, normally plan on continuing their season in the form of NXN or Foot Locker, but probably as often as not, only one or two runners at most on any high-school team stand a chance of being noticed at a regional championship, so if the team is done, any remaining standouts who feel ill or just less-than-invigorated have no conflict in calling it a season.

Those runners who do feel good are often sick of cross-country anyway, and wonder how fast they might be able to run a 1,600m, 3,200m or even 5,000m on the track at the end of a yugely successful cross-country campaign. (In my day, I and I alone might have tried the 5,000m after cross-country, but we* really weren’t that ambitious and no one was offering to organize such a de facto booby-prize anyway; we* just sat around glumly in Ray-Bans listening to Pink Floyd and waiting for indoor track to start. Some people skied, but the only easy-to-get meth in those days was in the form of triangular orange Desoxyn tablets that several of my friends’ moms had left over from the disco ‘70s as off-label weight-loss aids. Mark my words, I’m not even fucking kidding one bit about that at all, seriously. That stuff will heat up a brain quick.) It’s also not unprecedented for star harriers to try this, mostly, in my experience, in small November 3,200m-races. But this season, with no postseason at all thanks to COVID-19, anyone who felt the magic once early November had come and gone, and didn’t want to wait for an indoor track season that was unlikely to happen anyway, had to either find a race or meet to travel to safely or convince their parents to help set one up.

I should also point out here that verifiable track times are something you can show a college or other coach no matter where and what time of year it was run, and that this has been a major motivating factor in 2020, when kids had no outdoor track season at all. It’s great to run fast for its own sake, as every road hack like me who spent years trying knows, but it’s also great to have more leverage in negotiating down the cost of a college tuition, ideally to zero.

The New Hampshire cross-country season ended on a high note for most of its luminaries; that the season was even made possible is a matter worth a lot of independently packaged words, which I intend to produce and distribute soon. The Meet of Champions was held on November 7, at least a few weeks before it would have ended sans pandemic. I didn’t know that the stewards of the cross-country season had set up a “meet” featuring girls’ and boys’ 5,000m races at Portsmouth High School last Monday until after it happened, and ditto for the girls’ and boys’ 1,600m races at the same venue that were held this afternoon. But after the fact, I wasn’t surprised. The races feature some of the best runners from Maine as well as New Hampshire, making it a “battle of the border” thing, ending on the same day both Foot Locker Northeast and NXN Northeast would have ordinarily taken place.

No-spoiler alert: Each of those four links takes you to a race video, and if you’re interested enough in this stuff to want background on the major players, the announcers — who are MacKenzies from the far north, but father-and-son rather than beer-brewing Canadian brothers — provide most of that. The feature event was expected to be, and was, the boys’ 5,000m, given 15-1/2-year-old Aidan Cox’s 14:58 at Mine Falls Park at the Meet of Champions a little over two weeks earlier and the expectations that naturally set up. I don’t even think the state keeps official records for the 5,000-meter track event, but if it did, it would have to refer heavily to the stranger-than-bullshit 2020 cross-country season, more of a crack-country season given the unprecedented mix of turf and oval settings and some of the performances in this recent quartet of races.

Following this season and its runners, and chipping in a little help where I could, was the highlight of my autumn this year. I have a few things that get me up and eager to work pretty early in the morning, if not actually working, and these are completely independent of both Holiday goings-on and anything personally or societally contentious. Sadly, my next several posts are unlikely to make many people happy. They represent the kind of output I see as not only completely fair but to a great extent necessary, but I’m not sure I’d be writing such posts if I were only looking from the outside in at people who’d been targeted by the shithouse-rat discursive tactics now being seen, and rewarded, with greater and greater frequency in the running world. It’s fine to be motivated to write about broader topics by personal experience that includes personal animus, but adding this fuel variable makes it all the more important to keep the temperature of the fire approximately constant, or knowable.