Cross Country

An ode to a crazy sport

I’ll admit, I dreaded cross country (XC) races growing up. I used to pray for rain. Nay, not just rain, I prayed for torrential downpours so there would be no question about whether it would be safe to run. There is an old Catholic superstition about placing a Virgin Mary statue facing outdoors for good weather, so I turned it inward. I hated running races so much that I tried to invoke the intercession of the mother of Jesus. Like she didn’t have better things to do than to help a grade-schooler out with a weather request.

You might be asking why oh, why would she continue the ridiculousness of running cross country year in and year out from fifth grade through twelfth?

Good question.

It took me many years to realize that cross country running has this insidious way of sticking to your soul.

Where even 18 years after your last official cross country race, you still feel the itch to go for a run if it is a nice day.

Where you smell freshly cut grass and are immediately taken back to running through a field with your friends on some inane course that has incorporated a hill in the middle of it, this hill, of course, is just for funsies; it doesn’t make any sense with the rest of the route.

Where some of your closest friends in your thirties ran cross country with you in your teens.

Cross country running attracts a certain kind of folk. The girls I ran with were dedicated, hard-working…