“You’re going to OWN in the girl’s race!” my teammate James says to me as we begin our run. As he says this and proceeds to pass me, I feel a surge of nerves in my muscles. Will I own? Will I even be good at this? It hadn’t really hit me, but I suddenly realized that this is the first time in a very long time that I don’t know what to expect of myself.
After our run, my coach begins to tell me what I should do, how to run the first mile, what to do if I start to hurt, what to do if I don’t hurt and what a good time would be. With every answer he gives me comes another question, but not even my coach can provide all the answers to my unending questions. He asks me, “Do you like to go out fast, or do you like to reel people in?” I give him a blank stare. I think that he doesn’t even know what to do with me, which scares me a little. Coaches are supposed to have all the answers, right? I feel pretty weird, like an underclassmen all over again, but instead, here I am, a senior, with as much experience in cross country as a freshman.
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Today is the day of my meet. I’m surprisingly conscious of it, eating a good breakfast and a good lunch, snaking on granola bars and water. I hope weight training class this morning didn’t wear me out too much. My coach says I’m supposed to stay in the top 20 for the first mile and after that, I can reel people in if I want to. My stomach is doing gymnastics as I write this. From what I’ve heard from the more experienced teammates, first we will walk the course. After that, we’ll do a quick warm up, then the girl’s race starts at 4. I am so nervous. I feel like I’m about to step into the blocks at the state meet and run the 100 hurdles. Until now, that was the only event I was ever this nervous about. I have no idea what to expect, other than what people tell me, and even then, only time will tell.
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I hadevery right to be nervous. Running that 3.1 miles was the hardest thing I have ever done. The course was pretty flat, but it was all grass and after being trained on a responsive road, I had a pretty hard time. I didn’t go out too fast, I just stayed around the top 5, then floated back to 7th. The only thing I could think about was finishing. When I finally got to that last 800 meters, I lengthened my stride and took off. With nothing left in my legs or my lungs, I finished strong, but my true weakness showed after I had crossed the finish line. I couldn’t stand, but I had to; I couldn’t open my eyes, but I had to. In all my life, I’ve never felt like that before. I was a sober drunk, but I definitely didn’t feel good. I walked crooked and my coach had to walk me back to where we were camped. My teammate, Kirsten, crossed the finished line and crawled through the shoot. Everyone around me was probably thinking I should have been hauled off to a psych facility. I never want to feel like that again. In the end, I discovered that cross country is much harder than just ‘running.’ I will never look at a champion runner and say “I could do that,” because I’ve tried, and I can’t, at least not yet.