We awoke to find that it was still dark, still cold, and still raining in not-so-scenic Tacoma, Washington. After grabbing a quick snack, we bussed over to the course and quietly hid inside for as long as possible. But with an hour to go, we needed to leave our warmth and comfort to start warming up for the conference race. Tensions rose as we cheered for the girls as they ran by, covered in mud and tears, and we noticed and feared the 6 inches of puddles that covered the course. While jogging around, we tried to joke around and stay relaxed, but it was impossible not to wonder if we were going to be able to qualify for the regional meet or if this would be our last race together. We stretched out, strided, gave our final cheer, and stripped down to our short shorts and singlets. The rain intensified. We lined up, one last deep breath, and the gun goes off.
Cross country races are miserable. I tend to get nervous fairly easily, but the nerves felt before an important cross country race are unlike anything else I’ve ever felt. It’s not uncommon for athletes to puke before the race due to nervousness. For some people, nerves work in their favor, but most people perform their best when more relaxed. It becomes a constant struggle to both relax and focus solely on your race. And once the initial adrenaline wears off, it’s non stop physical pain for 25 or so minutes as you try and edge out every opponent.
Once the gun goes off, everyone goes out fast. A mix of adrenaline with wanting to get out with or in front of your opponents ensures that everyone goes out much faster than their pace. Elbows are thrown, people are pushed, but this is to be expected. After the first 800m, people calm down, and begin to settle into a race pace. This is when I noticed just how wet everything was; most people were slipping and sliding through every muddy turn. Also, you can start to see people employing different race strategies. For example, I relax and try to pass people later on, while Jeff Mullins, the closest runner to me on my team, goes out with the leaders and tries to hang on. Sometimes I pass him and sometimes he is ahead of me the whole race, but this this time I pass him up in the fourth mile which gives me an extra boost in speed and confidence. By this point everyone is in noticeable pain and the field has thinned out significantly. Thoughts about if finishing will be possible come through my mind and are forcefully pushed out. I go back and forth with a runner from Pacific University for the last mile before edging him out in the end. After the race, the total mental and physical exhaustion is evident from finishers collapsing, no longer in control of their own body, and we all congratulate each other and await the team results.
From the outside, it can be hard to see why anyone would want to be a part of a cross country race. Particularly at the NCAA division III level, where there are no monetary rewards or scholarships for being an athlete, but where runners are have to be motivated by internal factors. It then begs the question, what is it about cross country races attracts people to this often miserable and always painful experience? However, before answering this, a brief overview of the sport is required.
Cross country began in England as a game of chase between “hares” and “hounds”. As a formal sport, it was brought to the US in 1879, and the next year, Harvard University became the first US college to offer the sport, at first as an autumn training season for long distance track athletes (Robinson). Over the 20th century, cross country gained popularity separate from track for racing on trails and often with unforgiving conditions. In 2014, there were 18,217 collegiate men runners and 19,351 collegiate women runners in the US, or about 1 in 500 college students (College). Of those, 5,887 men and 6,193 women ran NCAA Division III (College).
For one of these athletes, a typical college cross country season has 4-6 regular season races and 2-3 possible championship races. A regular race has around 8-25 teams with 50-250 individuals in a race. This means that most every race feels important due to the relative lack of races and amount of competitors. The championship races in particular are important and whether or not teams get to race in them depends entirely on the performance of the varsity team. Take, for example, the Northwest Conference Championship meet described above; there were nine varsity teams, each with seven runners. The women ran at 10:00am, the men at 11:00am, and there was an awards ceremony at noon. Athletes start warming up generally an hour before the race, race for a half hour, and only then can relax.
However, despite being miserable, cross country races inspire pride and humility through a sense of accomplishment, identity, and competition. According to sophomore on the Lewis and Clark team, Jeff Mullins, “[Races are] never easy and they’re not supposed to be easy, but that’s kind of why everybody likes them” (Mullins). He describes:
There’s something rewarding about running. To me, in my experience, you’ll never truly understand it unless you do it yourself, but I’ll try to explain it. There’s a sense of reward that comes from every single race every single run you do. On top of the chemicals that are released in your brain and all the biology of it, there’s this sense of happiness you get at the end for saying you’ve done something. And you know every time you go on a run, no matter how bad it is, no matter how bad your race is, you’ve at least accomplished something. And you’ve worked really hard, and that’s always rewarding cause at the very least, no matter how well you do… that’s one of the most amazing feelings you could have, knowing that you have really put yourself into something (Mullins).
This sense of accomplishment seems to be universally shared among the cross country community. It is pretty amazing to devote one’s self to a simple task, like running everyday, and being quantifiably better at it than most of the population. Races also validate the hundreds of hours of hard work put into sometimes excruciating workouts and sometimes monotonous daily running. Immediately following the race, you know exactly how well, or poorly, you did, giving this immediate sense of accomplishment and validation. When you do finish well, it feels amazing to have your hard work pay off, and when you finish poorly, it is humbling to see that everything does not always work out as planned. Another source of accomplishment comes from really challenging oneself. Most runners come from middle or upper-middle class backgrounds, especially at the Division III level, and don’t generally do not face the same monetary and familial challenges that other Americans have to face daily. Racing, then, can be seen as a way to push oneself to his or her absolute limits, which is both novel and rewarding. Through validating one’s hard work and challenging one’s self, a runner feels both accomplished and proud of his or her work.
The importance of feeling accomplished is also evident in the stereotype that all cross country runners are failed soccer players. For example, Jeff was a standard soccer player in middle school before finding cross country, something he became very good at. While clearly representative of everyone, ex-soccer players are definitely a trend in the sport. I, while never having played soccer, was quite the awful swimmer and a mediocre TaeKwonDo student before finding cross country, something I could actually excel in, and for me, this made a big difference. Even though when I started running, I was no better than at swimming or TaeKwonDo, it was something where, when I put in more effort, I could see quantifiable results. I learned to love the sport and through continued effort, saw myself go from the second slowest runner on the team in 7th grade, to the fastest on the team my senior year.
This emphasis on excellence is also something that is also closely tied to personal identity in America. For example, if a job interviewer asks, “Tell me about yourself”, they expect you to answer with a short summary of past experiences, successes, and applicable strengths. They don’t care to hear about someone’s personal life, hobbies, and interests, but rather only values things that the interviewee has excelled at. People become defined solely by their professional careers and strengths, and even in casual conversation, Americans tend to tell others about their work before anything else. An identity is created around a job, around what someone excels at enough to get paid for. A teacher may define himself as a teacher before considering himself a father or musician. This could be demonstrative of many subtleties in American culture, but I think it shows the importance of having a box to put one’s self in and excel in.
In my own life, before running, I never considered myself a swimmer or TaeKwonDo student because I was never all that good at either of those. To myself and to my peers, I was just the quiet, kind-of-good student with the curly hair. When I did get good at running, I was still that, but above it, I was a runner. It not-so-subtly changed my life by giving me a sense of pride and standards to live up to. I was both had something I was good at and had to practice it everyday, culminating in the sense of accomplishment at the end of a race. In the same way that American adults are defined by their careers, I became defined by what I was good at and proud of, my running. I had a box to put myself in that I was happy with. Now, all my acquaintances see my cross country sweatshirts, me sitting at the cross country table in the cafeteria, me running around campus, and identify me, along with the rest of the Lewis and Clark team, as cross country runners. The sense of accomplishment and pride felt after a race provides runners with an identity.
A shared sense of identity also helps to create a cross country community. Team dynamics play a unique role in what is normally thought of as a more individual sport. For example, in a championship race, runners can either qualify as a team or as an individual, but it is much more fun to have a team to celebrate and continue training with. And while racing is an individual experience, having a team also motivates runners to perform their best and help the whole team place well and qualify for the next championship race. It is common for runners to perform more poorly when racing as an individual qualifier, as demonstrated this year by Tyler Shipley, a senior from University of Puget Sound, who won the conference and regional meets with his team by his side, but had his worst race of the season at the national meet without his team. In addition, every team that I have ever been on has had a deep family-like feel to it. While there is often drama and problems, everyone cares deeply for one another. This is demonstrated in the Men’s Lewis and Clark pre-race cheer taken from the 1989 animated film Madeline:
We love our bread,
We love our butter,
But most of all we love each other!
1, 2, 3 Pios!
This is yelled out by whole Men’s team, as loud as possible, jumping up and down with our arms around each other about 5 minutes from the start of a race. We pump each other up by expressing our love for one another. Yet, once the race starts, a shift seems to occur with how we treat each other. As first year on the team Ryan Nguyen states, “You train with your teammates, you hang out with them, you get to know them, but when it comes to racing, you want to beat your teammates just as much as you want to beat other runners. Its interesting but when i see a teammate in a race, I treat them as an opponent… but of course you want them to do well at the same time” (Nguyen).
This is a sentiment expressed by everyone I have talked to. People want to beat their teammates that they care so deeply for. It is common to see teammates running together, pushing each other to limits they might not have reached if not trying to beat each other. When running with a friend, you find that you can push yourself a little more to go with them, help each other, and maybe just beat them. However, within this fierce competition, there lies a sense of humility. Everyone is pouring out all of his or her energy and soul in the race, but some people are still going to have better races than others. And despite the finish of the race, it is humbling to see that everyone is united through a shared sense of pain.
Competition also plays with the roles of personal expectations and pride. Sophomore and the top finisher for the Lewis and Clark girls team, Kori Groenveld, describes her experience with this as the second finisher for our team pushed her harder than before. She described a need to defend her place as the top finisher. “This is my status on the team, this is my ranking, this is my number” (Groenveld). One reason runners are so competitive with their teammates is to assert their place on the team. If you are normally the top finisher for a team, there is a self imposed expectation for maintaining this placement and guidelines to be followed based on one’s position on the team. Top finishers for a team tend to treat running more seriously and be more respected by other runners while non-varsity runners are generally less respected. This is a shift that Kori and myself certainly noticed when we started improving. It can also be seen in how the top runners often talk to, congratulate, or wish luck to the top runners from other teams before or after a race, and much less commonly talk to the lower varsity or non-varsity runners. One’s placement on the team certainly becomes a source of pride, and it is humbling when you do not live up to those expectations.
It may seem contradictory that runners are the most competitive with their teammates they care about, beating one’s teammate does not even help the team score, but this is a trait that plays out in many different areas of American culture. With a capitalist economy, competition is certainly celebrated on an economic level, but this transcends most of the culture. For example, competition is taught to children early on in primary and secondary schools with an emphasis test taking, meeting standards, and besting our peers. And in cross country, this competition is amplified because everyone is competing in the exact same thing, and you can see exactly who you are better and worse than.
Jeff describes how this competitive spirit plays out in his own life: “The best people in anything are going to be the ones who are competitive. If you are always striving to beat the person in front of you, you’re certainly going to go further cause you’re always going to be trying to improve… in the bottom line, when you want to specialize in something, it’s going to be you and the other person. It’s your talent vs. theirs (Mullins).” One can see just how pervasive the belief is that competition equals success. In cross country races this almost always the case where the more competitive runners tend to be the fastest, and in American culture, the most successful, at least in terms of wealth, people also tend to be very competitive. Through using pride, cross country races seem to amplify this competitive spirit to the extreme, especially with teammates.
Competition plays a critical role during a cross country race, but at the end of the race, there are hundreds of participating runners, and most people don’t stand a chance at winning one race, let alone every race. Hard work and mental toughness can get someone very far in the world of running, yet, there is always someone that is still going to be leaner, more prepared, and more talented. As sophomore Ivan Ramos King puts:
It doesn’t matter how hard you work, [more talented individuals] are gonna beat you. And it is very evident, and i think that’s true in a lot of aspects in life, but people refuse to acknowledge it. People would like to believe that everyone has a chance and that we’re all equal and we can all obtain greatness and get rich someday, but really that can’t happen. There are people with the odds stacked against them. And I think running is a great example of that. It doesn’t matter how hard you train, you’re not gonna beat the world champion, you just don’t have the talent for that” (Nguyen).
Ivan’s comparison of cross country to the American Dream is very apt, not everyone can achieve riches and not everyone can be an olympian. In races, you have to constantly acknowledge runners that are and will likely always be better than you. Despite seeming upsetting, in truth, this is quite comforting. You are proud of the runners you beat and humbled by those you didn’t. You know exactly your place.
Cross country races inspire pride and humility though feelings of accomplishment, identity, and competition. At the end of the race, all of the anxiety, pain, and misery is worth it in order to feel proud of one’s accomplishments and identity and humbled by expectations and competition. Races also push athletes to their absolute limits in an environment that is reflective of and reinforces American cultural values of success and excellence. It’s important to note that this essay is intrinsically linked with the personal experiences of my close friends and myself on one cross country team in Portland, OR. This is in no way representative of every collegiate cross country race in the nation, much less the world. Further studies could explore the just how universal, or not, the cross country race experience is. As is, cross country races remain a crucial part in my life and in the lives of many others and continues to provide unique experiences of pride and humility.
Citations:
“College Cross Country & Scholarship Opportunities.” Scholarship Stats. Ed. Patrick O’Rourke. N.p., 2015. Web. 6 Dec. 2015.
Groenveld, Kori. Personal interview. 24 Nov. 2015.
Mullins, Jeff. Personal interview. 15 Nov. 2015.
Nguyen, Ryan, and Ivan Ramos King. Personal interview. 17 Nov. 2015
Robinson, Roger. “The Origins of Cross Country.” Runner’s World. Rodale, 13 Sept. 2009. Web. 07 Dec. 2015.