By Kendall Sommers, III Form

Cross Country Running: A Lesson in Collaboration

Running is like a weight being lifted off your shoulders, pushing through boundaries and working through physical and mental obstacles.  The first day of cross country, I fell in love with the sport. The sweat dripping off my face after a half hour of the most intense cardio I had ever done. The feeling of cool water refreshing my parched throat. But best of all, the mutual feeling of accomplishment among my teammates and me. It was eighth grade, last year, and I had never been on a team for running before. In fact, I had never run more than in my middle school basketball games or during gym class fitness testing. But nevertheless, I was drawn into the sport after hearing how rewarding it was from friends. And those friends were right.

Running is powered by individual ambition, but supported by a team. Having never run on a serious, all-girls, competing team before, coming to Saint Mark’s I did not know what to expect. Arriving at preseason, I could tell right away that it was the type of team you could join having run a half marathon over the summer or half a mile, and still feel important and valued as a teammate and friend. The captains launched us right into stretching and warming up and then into running. We started by running for thirty minutes without stopping, and that grew to a challenging sixty minutes by the end of the season. I hadn’t realized how perfectly simple the sport of cross country was. Lace up your shoes. Hit the pavement. Work hard. Repeat. So I repeated, every day for ten weeks. Slowly becoming faster, slowly becoming closer to my teammates and quickly adjusting to life at Saint Mark’s. (more…)