by Larry Eder
This is day six of week six of the 2022 RunBlogRun Fall Cross Country Training & Racing Program.
The highlights of fall cross country are coming up. Most of the 560,000 high school boys and girls have been racing in cross country for six weeks now. A good five to six races, some now going on ten races, are racing fit.
I one college race while at Santa Clara, our top runner, Paul Gyorey, took a runner from St. Mary’s out very fast through a downhill two miles. I lurked a bit. The St. Mary’s runner was faster by a minute over 10k than me. But I knew the hills evened our races out.
On the turnaround, the next three-plus miles were uphill and a short flat, giving us a three-hundred-meter uphill to the finish. By six miles, Paul had broken the runner and I continued to move up, coming even with the approaching uphill. I had done this hill at least a few dozen times in the summer, picturing going by a competitor on it. I wanted the challenge. As we hit the final 300 meters, I just put my head down, pumped my arms, and ran as hard as possible, knowing I needed nothing after the finish line. The feeling of going by a runner that you wanted to surpass was elation enough, the big PB and going 1-2 was even more of a high.
May you have a race you will remember fondly forty years later.
Your workout today is a good warm-up, some sprints, and a 5k cross-country race. Pick off as many as you can, and kick like crazy with 600 meters to go. Learn from the race. Then, do a 30-minute long cooldown, and stretch for a while.
