“Perry. It was out in the middle of nowhere, by the side of a highway. It was right next to a mobile home park in the middle of the woods. I mean, it was all uphill and downhill. And it rained the night before, so it was all mud, and we were crawling up and down the hills. This one hill, we went to the bottom, and it’s all mud, and you have to get on your hands and knees to crawl back up. … No one PR’d that day. We just went there and had fun.”

“Did your coach give you any advice before the race?”

“Use the hills. Use the hills to your advantage. Yeah, and he said just be careful not to fly off into the bushes. … After the race, we went to that [muddy] hill and did it a couple more times, just crawling back up it.”