Yesterday we had rain here, something that other parts of the country wouldn't mind sharing.
Here. it was something that terrified - not because of flooding, not because of hurricane force winds but because my team of budding young cross country runners was appalled at the very notion:
You mean we have to run in this?
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For the past three years I have coached a middle school cross country team, part of a community-focused league that works with the county school system to provide running opportunities for local middle schools. Aside from my primary task these past few years, writing a book, this is what I do these days.
Many folks reading this, by the nature of the older, whiter more educated and more liberal demographic that prevails in this part of cyberspace will be familiar with cross country as a sport. If not, never fear: The One True Wiki is here:
Cross country running is a sport in which teams and individuals run a race on open-air courses over natural terrain. The course, typically 4–12 kilometres (2.5–7.5 mi) long, may include surfaces of grass, and earth, pass through woodlands and open country, and include hills, flat ground and sometimes gravel road. It is both an individual and a team sport; runners are judged on individual times and teams by a points-scoring method. Both men and women of all ages compete in cross country, which usually takes place during autumn and winter, and can include weather conditions of rain, sleet, snow or hail, and a wide range of temperatures.
That last part is germane to our story. [
Stage whisper: I bolded those words to imply its importance!]
As the linked Wiki informs, there's more to cross country than just getting out and running: There's a lot of tactics. Race starts aren't like a track, where it's at most a couple of dozen runners for a 5K or 10K; you can have some serious mobs, sometimes of close to 100 teams (yes, you read that correctly) starting out on a wide grassy field, fighting for position before the first turn or bottleneck trailhead leading onto a lake trail or through the woods. That first turn....it's not a flaw but a feature of cross country that comes pretty quickly
And the turns keep coming. Cross country course design has a culture, that encourages few straights, lots of GENTLE turns and as little running on asphalt or hard-packed gravel/clay surfaces as possible. This is why golf courses lend themselves so nicely to double as cross country courses.
One suspects this is also why golfers and cross country runners do their best to ignore one another, less world war erupt - they compete for the same ecological niche and, because country club dues, for some reason the golfers feel like they own the place. Entirely unreasonable attitude, yet there you are.
But I digress from the headline topic of the weather and its relevance to cross country.
pause
Good news! I'm not through digressing!
Speaking of arch-enemy golf, cross country races - called meets (Psst! That's important, too, so I'm BOLDING it!) are scored with lowest team score winning.
Here's how I explained it to my runners this week: "The gold medal is better than the silver is better than rhe bronze. If we had cross country teams of one person each, who wins?"
"The gold team!" They cried out.
"We do that with cross country meets, only there are five scoring runners each." I then drew a sample scored meet on the whiteboard (no one seems to have blackboards anymore, pity):
Gold: 1, 6, 7, 10, 15 - 39 Gold wins but it's close!
Silver: 2, 5, 8, 11, 14 - 40
Bronze: 3, 4, 9, 12, 13 - 41
The runners proceeded to ask what would happen if Silver runners beat more of the Gold runners.
"Then they'd win, because all it would take is one switch of places to change the team scoring outcome."
"Ooh."
I then explained why the 5th finisher (old parlance: the 5th man) is the most important component of the team score: He or she is a big chunk of points; there are only so many runners who can be in the top four of a race (hint: 1, 2, 3, 4; you can't be any 1st-er) but there's nearly no limit to how far BACK a runner can fall in the pack (You. Can. Go. All. The. Wayyyyyyy.) In our league we often see fields of runners numbering up to 90 or 100. 100th place would be painful.
Fortunately we're a pretty strong squad this year. We were last year, too. The first year - 2012 - the team was mostly scared newbie 6th graders. We weren't just the worst team in the league; we were MAGNIFICENTLY worst.
Then my 6th graders who stayed became 7th graders. Some had 7th grader friends who came out and gave us a try. We finished 3rd in the league.
Here's how that worked, using the same 'medal team' nomenclature:
Team Gold 4, 7, 17, 21, 22 - 71 points (three 8th graders)
Team Silver 1, 12, 20, 23, 24 - 81 points (two 8th graders, including indiv. champion)
Team Bronze 8, 10, 15, 19, 33 - 85 points (us last year, all 6th/7th graders)
Now, that race took place on a sunny day - a touch muggy for November but it wasn't raining.
Now we flash forward to 2014.
This year, we lost a lot of runners to other sports and transfers. We also gained greatly from two track runners, one of them who just happens to be Pod #1 - my oldest son - who has gone from a small plump 6th grader to a tall, very strong 8th grader in, by definition, two years. He's our presumptive #3 runner now and he is right now better than our best runner from last year.
And so is the #4 runner. In short we have four boys who are better than anyone on the 2014 squad. They're older, they're stronger, they're more focused.
Regardless, there are only four of them....which brings us to the incoming class of 6th graders.
The bad news is, well, they're new to cross country. The workouts are shockingly difficult. Cross country's hard stuff! You have to respect the challenge and train appropriately for it. My challenge as a coach is to assure them it's worth the discomfort, that nothing they are doing will break their bodies or their spirits, and that I will never, ever ask them to do something for which they are unprepared.
Oddly enough that's a hard sell...until the first race, when the kids see either of two things: "One, yeah, we're ready. Or Two: Oh heck, we need to work out more so those kids in the burgundy uniforms don't whomp us later on."
I should clarify that a little whompage, what adult grown-up road racers sometimes referred to as "getting your ass cut" back in the day [the late 1990s], is a powerful motivator. In middle school competition, where I most certainly cannot use that expression, a serious thumping can be disheartening. We do not want that.
So we train hard for a few weeks, same as the competing schools, to prepare for the first meet. Our league starts REALLY late - it's nearly October. In the private/charter school leagues, they've been at it since August. October in North Carolina is when the high schools start up county and sectional championships. Our schedule is what it is.
Yet running meets this late means it tends to be cooler (that's a GOOD thing in the Southeast) and drier (and even BETTER thing!)....except for odd spot of rain, which we had yesterday.
We also had a mile time trial, a warm-up for next week's first race. We did our race on the track, which was a necessity as it was, well, muddy and wet and the school campus gets very uncooperative when drenched and the school district grounds people frown upon little stomping feet chewing up their busted up, chewed up school grounds even further. Thus, on the track.
Now, I have runners at all development levels, both girls and boys...and there's a world of difference between how well an experienced 8th grade boy can run and a newbie 6th grade girl...and I have the whole range this year. I didn't want the developing runners to get lapped, possibly twice (it was, on paper, a nonzero risk), so I sorted out the runners based on their past hard workouts (all, um, three of them) into comparable groups or flights...
...and we ran the mile time trial as a handicap race. This also served a different purpose:
It took their minds off the rain and, bless their hearts, the rain really, really preoccupied almost the entire lot of my runners.
Thus the trailer remark: We have to run in this?
Me: You're tough; you can take it. You'll do fine.
I explained the handicap race groups and what would happen:
Flight One: Starts when my watch starts (aka 'the scratch golfers'; the majority of the girls squad)
Flight Two: 60 seconds after the scratch golfers (a couple of the boys)
Flight Three: 90 seconds after (my #1 girl and most of the 6th grade boys)
Flight Four: 120 seconds/2 minutes later (my strongest upperclassmen)
Running the kids in flights, slowest to fastest, simulated the urgency of working together to hold a lead versus competitors chasing them in an actual cross country race. Remember what I said about scoring earlier
The upperclassmen (who started two minutes behind the first flight) served as the pursuit squad, and clearly enjoyed the challenge. They held generally steady pacing throughout (1:30, 3:22, 5:04, 6:43-6:46) and gradually reeled in all the younger runners but one, who earned first place for the girls in our informal handicap scoring.
The boys 'won' 26-31, a rather close score in XC; it could just as easily have gone the other way.
Our top girl - a 6th grader - ran with a pack of 6th grade boys until the 7th/8th graders overtook them with 600m to go. At that point, she went after the upperclassmen as best as she could.
The #2-#4 girls ran very well as a group, only separating out on the third lap, then converging somewhat on the second. They're starting to run workouts as a group, as well. I like seeing that. They also encouraged the #5-#6 girls to hang with them as long as possible though that pace might have been a bit aggressive for them. (I think I'll make them the 'scratch golfers' next time and bump everyone else up another 30 seconds.)
For most of the runners this was their first timed mile race. Also, a mile on the track is mentally grueling exercise; the rain only made it more of a chore. Yet the kids duked it out and were proud to put the effort behind them. A few would have liked to have run faster but the good news is they'll have a chance to do just that come Monday.
Because, who knows? It might rain...and like the One True Wiki said long ago at the start of this opus: Yes, that's right: We run cross country in the rain.
6:43 B7 (Boy, 7th grade)
6:45 B8 (happens to be Pod #1)
6:46 B8
7:43 G6 (Girl, 6th grade; I think you get how we're coding these now)
8:05 B6
8:08 B6
8:40 G6
8:44 B6
8:53 G6
8:57 G6
9:35 B7
11:24 G6
11:35 G6
Added bonus: We do coed scoring.
Another added bonus: One of my 8th graders was out sick that day. He runs in the 6:40s too.
One last thing: Hypothetical meet between 2014 and 2013 teams.
Recall the 2013 team was 3rd in the league; they represent a formidable benchmark. How do we rate?
I keep records, so I know how our 2013 squad would have run a mile workout Here's how it would play, by places, Westerday's workouts versus the BEST marks
2013 1, 6, 7, 8, 9 - 31 points
2014 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 - 24 points - WINNER
Oh, by the way: In 2014 that's the 5th FINISHER, not the '5th man'. Get with the 21st Century, yo. :)
I think we're going to be just fine this year...rain or shine. :)
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September 24, 2014
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