High School Cross Country

I entered high school in the fall of 1967. Our high school had grades 10-12, so I was a sophomore. I was too small (112 lbs) to even think about football, and cross country was supposed to get you in shape for wrestling, so cross country was it for me until wrestling practice started. I wanted to be ready to wrestle.

The cross country team was small, maybe 20 runners at most. Roughly half of the team was made up of sophomores; first-time runners. The workouts were hard; attrition was severe. The workouts were hard on sophomores because they (we) were physically and mentally unprepared for the sport. Some of the sophomores quit after the first week of practice. Only half of the sophomores would come back for a second year. Another handful would be lost between the junior and senior years. We had two seniors on the team that first year. We were always looking for recruits to perpetuate the team next year.

Football and tennis were the other fall sports. I’ve had a perpetual chip on my shoulder due to the lack of recognition for my sport. Football was, and is, everything in high school. One time they arranged a “cross country” (bullshit) race on the track during halftime of a home football game. While I was simultaneously thrilled and scared to death to have all of my classmates see me run, I was also humiliated that my sport was a mere circus sideshow, a freak show, to the main event which was the football game.

I knew nothing about distance running, but the seniors and juniors on the team taught me everything I needed to know. Pacing, arm carriage, hand position, stride length, foot plant, running posture, head carriage, protocol, etiquette, repeats, oxygen debt, long runs, tempo runs, speed work, recovery runs, rest days, tapering, strategy, starts, finishes, and scoring were covered as we trained. Running wisdom was passed on from seniors and juniors to the sophomores. There were rumors that there was a book or two about distance running, but we never saw one. It was the 60s and the running boom had not begun.

The coach was a quiet, pleasant gentleman; generally harmless; seemingly ancient to a teenager. I suspect he was there mostly for the pay supplement that came with coaching a sport. How to put this in a kindly fashion? He knew a modest amount about the sport. He did not need to know a lot because the real knowledge resided in the hands of the juniors and seniors. The workouts did not need to be elaborately well thought-out; we would get out of the workouts whatever we put into them. We only needed a coach to read splits off of the stopwatch, enter us in meets, record the results, and provide the general infrastructure under which the team operated.

It turned out that I was pretty good at this distance running gig. I liked the hard work, the straightforward nature of the activity, and the lack of trickery. The better runner would win due to hard training and supreme effort during the race, not because of a trick play or an errant ruling by a referee. So I worked hard, and found myself able to keep up with the upperclassmen during workouts. I finished in the top seven at the first time trial to make the varsity. The upperclassmen were thrilled to have a new teammate with some ability. They adopted me as a disciple. I was thrilled to be a novitiate, to belong, to be accepted. I was part of a team.