by Madi Hayter |

“It’s the final hundred yards, you’ve just entered the chute and you can hear your teammates yelling at you. Your heart is pounding, your legs ache from the changing terrain of the course. You have one hundred yards to express yourself and to pass this one last guy, you can hear him breathing; you can hear his feet slamming against the ground. You give it all you’ve got and push for the last few yards across the finish line. You get across to see your coach and your teammates congratulate you. You did it. You finished the race,” sophomore Jared Karr said.

It is a new year and a new team, and Cross Country has had a successful year so far. On homecoming weekend, the team hosted a meet at Stocksdale Park.

“It went really good. Our guys performed really, really well, and we came in close second against Ray-Pec.” Junior Austin Gale said. “[The JV Boys,] we performed really well compared to how difficult the course is. Everyone got a lot of personal records,”

With two meets already hosted, as of October 6, Liberty has hosted all of these at Stocksdale. Stocksdale is the second hardest Cross Country course in Missouri. The route is a 5K, or 3.1 miles.

“There were about three seasons in a row where we didn’t have a course, we didn’t host a meet. In the last ten years, it’s been at Stocksdale, our home course,” Coach Tim Nixon said.

The Cross Country team seems to be very close, having many traditions or team bonding often. They recently visited the corn maze.

“A lot of parents either host a party or dinner. They have spaghetti dinner or pasta, carbohydrates before a race,” Marquardt said. “We do a lot of traditions hosting parties. We like to have a good time. We have a lot of parties, we have a MU banquet. We take them out to the pumpkin patch, and they run out in the corn maze, we have a pizza party.”

“Usually it’s a good meet if you run well, and have fun. A lot of meets when it’s really hot outside don’t run as well or when it’s raining, and some people don’t run as well. But then if you run really well, you’re usually in a better mood, and people usually have more fun.” Gale said.

When a meet goes well, it can become a runner’s favorite.

“My favorite meet was the state meet, last year, in Jefferson City. The environment was crazy, it was so much fun. We got there a day early, and got to stay in a hotel, which is also really fun.” Nasteff said. “Whenever we got to the meet in the morning there were just so many teams, it was incredible experience to be able to run with the fastest people in the state.”

Having a good time is just another benefit to running Cross Country.

The team experienced a whole different environment than they are used to down in Joplin. Nixon described it as nothing they could have prepared themselves for, but it was a successful meet.

“This whole year has been fun for me, this is my first year on varsity, [I have] always been JV. But every meets exciting, my favorite meet this [would be] year probably Missouri Stampede, down in Joplin.” Wilburn said. “Down south it rained really hard for a couple days straight. The course flooded, we were running through puddles of water the entire time, there were probably about 10 or 12 times we were running through these like actual rivers that were across the course, we were about shin deep in water,” he said. “The most fun part of the race was the finish line, there’s probably about 100 meters left, there was a giant pond of water, about 20 yards long, just running knee deep in water. Then coming across the finish with a bunch of people cheering,” Wilburn said.

The good times seem to keep rolling with the Cross Country team. At the end of each meet the team says that they thank the coaches who made the meet possible. As a coach, Nixon says that it means a lot to him when people thank him, so he has the team do that for others. He is getting them to develop what they call a “gratitude attitude.”