Crossing Our Fingers

Crossing Our Fingers

This summer a group of us boys on the Cross Country team decided to push ourselves and each run 1000 miles in the 14 weeks of the off season. 12 miles became our daily diet on runs and we often added runs on Sundays to meet our goal. We jumped through hoops, worked around schedules, jobs, vacations, injuries and growing pains and stepped into August in great shape.

After all that time, the work seemed to pay off. Many of us were running personal bests and we were even able to move from the bottom 40 in the state to one of the top seven best, competing with powerful schools like Rockhurst, Park Hill South and St. Joe Central. We were on cloud nine going into the state series during October and even became Suburban Red Conference Champions.

Unfortunately, after sectionals we were unable to move on as a team and qualify to state. However, our top two runners Ryan Flood and Max Martin moved on as individuals.

You would think that after working so hard and so long that a team would just move and wait for next year to come, but instead we came back to have a team meeting and talk about what happened. It was refreshing, there was no finger pointing, no pouting, no “I wish I would have’s” and only a few tears. We each congratulated each other telling one another how proud we were of what we accomplished and even formed realistic ideas for improving further on down the road.

Sure we didn’t make it as a team to state, but that didn’t mean that we weren’t still a team. We all still supported Max and Ryan and went to Jefferson City to cheer for them. The future looks bright for our squad and although we’re not excited about it, we are fortunate to only lose one incredibly strong senior this year. We really were able to set ourselves up to do some more amazing things during this next season, so don’t be surprised to see a group of scrawny boys clutching a big shiny trophy come this time next year.