Welcome to my podcast. Today, something actually did happen. We had another cross-country meet. And this meet definitely did not go as well as the last one, where we basically dominated. Just as a quick reminder, cross country is kind of like golf or mini golf, I guess, because you want the lowest score. First place gets one point, second place gets two points, and so on. I’m on a cross-country team, so I probably should understand this system better, but basically only the top runners really matter when they calculate the team score.
This time, I finished in the top eleven, and I was the second Beaver middle-school runner to finish. I came in eighth place. I’ll tell you one thing: this meet was not something any of us were prepared for. We were racing against Milton and Dexter, and just hearing those names, I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Dexter especially was definitely not like some of the teams we had raced before. When you looked at their runners, they just looked ready. Everyone looked athletic, fit, and prepared to race.
When the race started, the first thing I noticed was that we had the horsepower. At the beginning, we were actually beating them. One Milton kid was out front, but give it about twenty seconds and suddenly around ninety percent of our team was behind. Then one kid tried to be smart and shoved me, so I shoved back. He was trying to push me toward the fence, but I sprinted away right before he did it.
My coach calls that “burning a match,” because you only have so many hard sprints you can use during a race. He probably didn’t realize I was about to sprint, because when I moved, he basically went toward the fence instead. I have no idea what happened to him after that. I just kept running.
I didn’t stop for anything. At one point, I saw the runner in front of me and thought I was doing pretty well. Then I realized where I actually was in the race, and I started freaking out. I was dying. Genuinely dying. Everyone was running so fast. I was basically getting schooled.
When we finally finished, our team had a few strong runners near the front, including me, but after that there was a pretty big gap. A lot of the seventh and eighth graders from the other teams filled the rest of the places. Basically, only a few of our runners were really helping our team score, and the other teams pretty much wrecked us. I don’t think we came close to winning the meet.
But the bus ride back was actually really fun. Everyone was tired and completely exhausted. One kid brought Gatorade, which was very useful because, for some reason, I didn’t bring water, so he basically saved my life. Then the music started. Our school bus does not have one type of music. It has, like, ten completely different types of music happening at the same time. Imagine someone playing “Country Roads,” someone else blasting rock, another person playing rap, and then random people singing school songs. Nothing matched.
It was probably one of the most chaotic things you could ever hear. People were screaming, yelling, singing, and even dancing on a moving bus. Everyone was celebrating like crazy. I understood why it was fun, but I mostly just sat there watching everything happen around me. I looked fine. I was not fine. I was exhausted.
The race also made me realize something about our team. We have a few genuinely fast runners, but I recently discovered that some people who look extremely fast during practice might actually already be running close to their maximum. At practice, they seem really fast and they are but when the competition starts, some runners from other schools suddenly go to another level. That was interesting to see.
Was the meet terrible? No. But it definitely didn’t look great for us either. Still, I finished eighth, I survived, and the bus ride home was completely insane, so I guess it was fine.
Anyway, stay tuned for my next episode. And yes, I did shove that person back. So here is one more cross-country rule: never shove somebody during a race.
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