“I threw up three times after the race today.”
“And I know you’ll run tomorrow. What’ll make you put in the miles tomorrow?”
“Yeah, I’ll run tomorrow. Definitely. I have to push harder and not let it happen again.”
Nos. 78 & 80, Revisited [Runners]
runners
No. 80 [Runners]
“This was about the time I started getting into cross-country. One morning, I was in Ohio staying at this hotel. And my mom gets up, and she’s been dieting and stuff, and she’s like, ‘I’m gonna go to the weight room, and I’m gonna walk on the treadmill. If you need me, I’ll be in there. I’ll just let you keep sleeping.’ Then I was like, ‘Wait, I’ll come with you.’ So I got up and ate breakfast at six in the morning. Right after I ate breakfast, I went to the workout room. And I thought there was going to be squats there, and I enjoy doing squats. … I get down there, it’s one of those corner machines—those things are confusing. I see a treadmill. I’m like, All right, whatever. My mom gets on a treadmill, she’s walking, I get on one, I start walking a bit. Mind you, my breakfast was 400 calories. I turned it up, I started running. Next thing I know it’s 10 minutes. Keep running, OK, now it’s 16 minutes. It’s 6:20 in the morning, and I’ve run two miles already. I keep running, and I run like five miles that morning, and it’s not even 6:40 yet. And I burned off 1,000 calories, and my breakfast was 400. So I went and had a second breakfast, and it tasted delicious.”
No. 79 [Runners]
“I’ve started around 800 races and meets—cross-country and track. This is my 18th year. … When the meet is over, I don’t have to run to the locker room or my car. I’ve only had a few people tell me that my start was bad.”
“If you could give one piece of advice to high school cross-country runners, what would it be?”
“One? Ah, well, it’s important to know the course. And for the coaches, it’s important to know the rules.”
No. 78 [Runners]
“This summer in July, in Charlevoix, Michigan, I ran the Jeff Drenth 10K. I had been suffering from an IT band problem, and it was giving me knee pains in my right leg. I was doing great, and I was making goal pace, until the fifth mile. Then I got knee pain, and I struggled through it for another quarter-mile. And then I was just completely frustrated, and I had to walk for about 30 seconds. So I just decided to take my shoes off because I felt that they were the reason why I was having the problem. I ran the last mile with no shoes. It was great, too, because it was wet, and they were pretty much water-logged anyhow. I was just running in long, shin-high socks. Just basketball socks. … I came in, and my mom was like, ‘What’s he carrying?’ I had a shoe in each hand. I came across the finish line like that. And I still won in my age group.”
Nos. 76 & 77, Revisited [Runners]
“It was during the summer of 2013, and we just started—we didn’t even know each other, did we? It was seventh-grade year for us. We wanted to join cross-country, and they said they were doing a ‘square’ that day. And we had no clue what it was. It’s a six-mile run. So we were nervous, and we ran together, and, well … Almost about halfway through—or we thought it was about halfway through—it wasn’t. It was one mile in, and we died. We just stopped. We were walking. We were so out of shape. … We also got pretty lost. Our coach comes around to see who’s still running and picks us up, and we got picked up. And he’s like, ‘Why are you still out here, ya losers?’ He was kidding, he was kidding. … It was our first impression of cross-country, and it wasn’t a good one.”
[They told me the “Square” is not a fun run. It’s not shady, it’s hilly. Then they told me about the “Megasquare”—a nine-mile run.]
Hooray Run 