Cedar Rapids Cross Country Invitational

I had another amazing week of cross country. Last Thursday we won the Cedar Rapids cross country invitational! We beat number 2 ranked Linn-mar by 5 points! It was a huge victory for us! We are undefeated 3-0 and I think last year we only won 2 meets!

We finished with 4 girls in the top 11 and our 5^th runner was 21^st.

My coaches and my dad have been drilling me about getting out faster (the first meet I ended up in almost last by the 200 meter mark and had to pace about a hundred people). I really just don’t understand how people can full out sprint the first 100 meters of a race. The beginning of a race scares me way more than it should. The shooting of the gun, the screaming of the crowd, it’s just all together frightening and then everyone sprints like crazy as soon as the gun is shot. So my goal for this race was to get out fast and stay with one of my teammates who is amazing at starting a race. This way I would not scare my parents and coaches who are probably thinking I am going to run horrible (since I would be in basically last place) and I would save some energy and time by not having to randomly speed up and slow down to pass people. When the gun shot I ran as hard as I could and I stayed in the front. It was a little tiring, but I quickly recovered and I think I saved a lot more energy than if I had to change my pace to pass people. I strongly recommend starting a race out in the front, because it’s too much work to pass everyone in the race.

The rest of the race went really well, because three of my other teammates and me ran together and pushed each other. It was just a line of Kennedy runners around 7^th place for most of the race. The last 800 meters is where we start to separate. I ended up passing a girl from Iowa City around the 400 meter mark and a girl from Linn-mar around the 50 meter mark, so I was pretty proud about that and I ended up getting fifth place. I truly think that running in a group is a lot easier than running alone.

After the race I was greeted by a lot of my close friends (one of which was asking our fifth runner to homecoming at the end of the race).

I loved this meet! I literally could not sleep that night, because I was still so excited. I could not believe how well we did, all because we got out fast and stayed together.