6th Meet

Last Tuesday my cross country team had our 6^th win of the season! We remain undefeated! It’s extremely amazing to win a meet and it’s absolutely unbelievable to have won six meets in a row! I am still in shock by how good our team is this year.

This meet was in Iowa City at the same course we ran on in the second meet of the year. I ended up running 14:44, which was 25 seconds faster than when we ran there in the second meet.  I placed fourth and was the second runner for Kennedy. It was a good course and since our team runs together for most of the race we do pretty good. I think we also are running better, because of the training we did at the begining of the season.

This was one of my favorite courses for many reasons. Courses with long straight away’s (The first stretch of the race before you have to make the first turn), like Iowa City’s make the start of the race a lot easier. Having a long straight away allows for enough room for everyone to start the race without being trampled and in my opinion, also makes the beginning of the race feel shorter. The course also is one big long loop, instead of multiple loops around the same course. I also think that this makes the race seem a lot faster. One thing that is bad about this course it that it is in a hay field. If you have allergies and you’re running in a hay field make sure to bring allergy medicine, because for me, running always makes my allergies worse.   

There is no one in our team that is exceptionally good, but we have four people who are pretty decent and a fifth runner who is not too far from us. Because we have such a close team, we are able to accomplish a lot in meets. I think the most important thing on a cross country team is to have a close team. It not only makes cross country more fun, but it’s the reason our team is doing so well. If you can push yourself to run with the people in front of you, there is a good chance you will be more successful.

We have been training for our race by running intervals on Mondays. I can't even explain how much these intervals suck, but I think that they are a big part of why we're getting a lot faster. We run 4-5 1000-1200 meter intervals. They take forever to recover from, but I think they are really helping us. We never did them last year, and now that we are doing them this year we are all a lot faster.