During my senior year of high school, I wanted to join a team that didn’t involve a ball. I’ve always enjoyed running and seeing others run. Great runners always seem to have a certain determined look on their faces, yet a calm relaxed energy around them too. I thought I would give cross-country a try. I had never done it before, but I knew it required one thing: a lot of running.
Like basketball, the coach made us to a lot of different drills, except most of these drills were meant to strengthen your leg muscles and test your endurance. It’s easy for someone to say, “Go run for a long time” as practice (and we did, sometimes for many miles a day to places I had never seen before), but that wasn’t all there was to a fast runner in the most crucial times of the races. What helped was a mixture of different distances of runs – short and long.
Most people might think running long distance is easy. After all, there’s not that much skilled involved. But when you’re running cross country, you no longer are running for the heck of it, you are running to push yourself to get a better time each time.
Some people may have taken cross country as a way to weight and I don’t blame them; you will lose weight if you do cross country. Time, for these people, isn’t as serious. But for the people who joined cross country as a way of seeing how fast you could run during a race (3 miles), every ounce of energy, every droplet of sweat, and every second in time counts.
In my very first race, I remember feeling different emotions going through the entire start to finish process. For the 1st mile, you run fast and think that this is a breeze, for the 2nd mile you start to get tired and wonder where is the finish line, for the 3rd mile, not only do you feel like your legs are about to collapse, but feel like you want to puke. But the thing is, however tired you may be during a race, you never stop until you reach the end.
My PR (personal record) was 18:36 which is quite slow in the world of cross country (just a little over 6 minutes a mile). There were many people who ran over 20 minutes a mile. One of my friends came in so slow, that they stopped the timer before he ever had a chance to finish. But I’d always admire people that could run 3 miles in the 15 minute range. I knew those people were the best of the best, taking massive amounts of discipline and practice to finish in a time like that.
The different thing about cross country and the other sports I played, basketball and tennis, was that you really never have any opponents. In basketball you have a team playing against another team. In tennis you’re on one side of the court playing against an opponent on the other side of the court. And although in the cross country races, you may be running with one hundred other people at once, you’re biggest opponent is time. You don’t have that control over how to outplay your opponents like in basketball or tennis. The only thing you can really concentrate on improving is how fast and how long your two legs can endure for.
And that’s the biggest lesson I learned from cross country – endurance. People may think that cross country is all physical, since all your really doing is running. But during the moment, a lot of it surprisingly is mental. From the emotions you’re going through while you’re running to the things that you are thinking about, all these things affect your ability to carry on towards the finish line when you’re body is telling you to stop.
I think that’s also how life is when it comes to getting things done. Whether it is to finish at the finish line or to accomplish a goal that we want, one must be able to have the strength to continue, to last, and to go through hardships despite obstacles such as discouragement, or in the case of running, fatigue. Some people in cross country give up and sit on the side lines, watching others move ahead, while others don’t care how tired they are, they just want to finish.
Ultimately, cross country has taught this me lesson which is that if we want to finish something, whether it’s crossing the finish line or finishing a project, we must be able to endure through the tough times and just keep going.
Photo Credit: espinr
