“From my understanding, ‘tunas’ are little inside jokes that have happened on runs and at races. We say tuna when we do butterfly stretches. The captains will go, ‘Tu!’ and then everybody else will say, ‘Na!’ Basically, we have a bunch of those. … We had this tuna we made one day—it wasn’t super drastic. We were running out that way, toward 160th, I think. And Michael Perry, a kid who was a senior last year, was running, and there’s like a plastic caution stick next to a fire hydrant. He tried to jump over it, and he landed on it and broke it off, in half. He was standing there holding it, and everyone ran past him and was like, ‘Oh my gosh! What have you done?’ And later that day, we had a tuna. The captains yelled ‘Perry!’ and then everyone else yelled ‘Stick!’ for ‘Perry Stick.’ That’s the best part, because anybody else who hears that is like, ‘What on earth does that mean?’ … A tuna is something that happens, like an inside joke that we talk about only when we’re doing butterfly stretches.”
[Note: Tunas go back a long way—possibly to the early 2000s—in Grand Haven XC history. Will Hewitt, GH’s assistant coach and a former GH runner, contributed to this quote.]
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