7th Meet

I really do not want to write this post. No matter how much I do not really want to write it I feel obligated to talk about each of my meets, and I did learn a lot in this meet. Last Thursday, I learned how it felt to lose a meet (well really we got third place, but it was a huge lose for us).

The meet started out good. Runners in the races before us were running close to the same times they have been and we had beat all the teams there before, so I had a good feeling about this race. I was also completely shin splint-free and full of confidence.

The race started like every other race. KW and AC were a little bit in front of me and LM was right next to me. Around the half mile mark I noticed LM was not even that close to me, which I thought was weird, but figured I had just started the race too fast and she would catch up to me. So I kept on running and I was still behind KW and AC until I passed KW and then I passed AC. I figured I was doing pretty well, but I had some concern for my teammates, who at that point, I had no idea where they were. We normally stick together for most of the race.

I approached the clock at the finish line and estimated my time to me 14:55 (which it actually was).  At first I was thinking okay it’s not great but at least I am still under 15 and then I looked over to watch KW and AC finish. They did not do that great (probably 10-20 seconds worse than me).  Then I started looking for LM. I saw her still running with about a hundred yards left and then I looked up at a board, which showed all of the finishers from the school they are from and I noticed are chances of winning the meet were declining.

I was then overcome with emotion. I wanted to scream and cry. I was so overcome with anger and then I thought, where the hell is CS (our fifth runner)? I saw Jensen (our coach), who I think was experiencing some of the same feelings, and I asked him where she is, he shrugged and said about 60^th. Then I went and ran my cool down, by myself, and accidently gave death glares to some people.

I later learned that LM was cutoff and she tripped and fell and her leg was bruised and scraped up. So I definitely could not blame her for doing worse then she normally does, but what about CS, who ran almost a minute slower than normal.

I think I take cross country way to seriously, because even though CS is one of my good friends I am still having a hard time not being mad at her and the race was 3 days ago. I am still disappointed with this meet. I learned that when you are doing so good and you have a really bad race, it’s hard to remember the good races. The best thing to do is to just not have those kinds of races, but unfortunately, almost every team/person does, so you just have to get yourself back out there and work harder next time.

So our team is officially undefeated and it sucks.