As someone who ran cross country all four years of high school and two more in college, I know a thing or two about the sport and the people who compete in it.
So I say this with respect and affection — cross country runners are weird.
A fair assessment?
“Yeah, I would say so,” Hockinson junior Lyla Taylor said. “What I’ve learned is that you kind of have to love to suffer to be a runner. You have to want to suffer if you want to be good. So, yeah, that’s weird. Not a lot of people want to do that.”
In cross country, competitors run 3.1 miles through trails, over hills, in the heat, in the cold, in the rain.
If you asked them which course they’d like to run on — the one on a nice paved bike path or the one that includes a giant mud puddle — a cross country runner will chose the mud puddle nine times out of 10.
Perhaps a nicer way of saying it is cross country runners are different.
“It’s very different than any other sport,” Taylor said. “Like soccer, I love playing soccer. I used to play soccer my whole childhood. But I’d never suffered in soccer. I suffer in cross country.”
Mark Morris senior Tate Armstrong says he likes cross country because he likes to challenge himself and see what he can do.
“I just loving running, and I love competing,” Armstrong said. “I just love trying to push through every race to see if I can get better. And I have fun out here as a team, spending time with my teammates.”
What’s the old saying? Misery loves company.
But another attraction of cross country is it requires no particular skill. Anyone can run cross country. And anyone can be good at cross country.
“The time you put in and the more you work on running, the more you run, the better you’ll become,” Armstrong said. “And the more fun it’ll get because you’ll learn how to run, learn different strategies and stuff like that.”
Taylor likes to tell new runners to not give up, no matter how hard it seems.
“If you’re running a 15-minute (mile) pace, you’re still running,” Taylor said. “So that’s what I tell all the girls that are completely new to it. It might be hard. It might seem like not the most fun sport. But if you don’t give up, and you put your work in, put your miles in, then eventually it becomes much more fun.”
There’s a saying in cross country that goes “Our sport is your sport’s punishment.”
Very true. But then what is a cross country runner’s punishment?
“Probably like lifting,” Armstrong said. “Anything with your arms, like pushups.”
“Core,” Taylor concurred. “I would say core workouts. No one likes to do those.”
So cross country is hard. But if you can get past the fact that it’s hard, you’ll learn to appreciate the fact that it’s hard.
Eventually, the fact that it’s hard is the part you’ll love most about the sport.
“Yeah, that’s definitely it,” Taylor said. “I mean, getting up every day and doing something hard, I’d say it’s like the hardest thing I’m going to do all day. When I’m doing a hard workout, if this is the hardest thing that I’m doing, then I’m lucky.”
