I am now a
cross-country coach. Three times a week, I run three miles with 21 St. Monica
middle-schoolers. We run up hills, around trees and through the wooded paths of
local parks. I had run cross country competitively in high school and college,
but a serious injury to my ankle in the middle of college left me unable to run
with any kind of speed. While I used to live and breathe competitive running,
the injury relegated me to recreational running on the streets around our
house, and in the fifteen years since college, I hadn’t thought too much about
cross country.
But
now, thanks to Jacob, who likes to run and needed a coach for his team, I’m
back in the cross-country world. This time, though, I’m looking at the sport
from the perspective of adult and coach, rather than adolescent and competitor,
and I have found that I’m startled by what I see. While Robert Fulgrum boiled
his life lessons down to a kindergarten classroom, I am discovering something similar:
Everything I needed to know, I learned on a cross-country course.
Cross-country
taught me that in life, very few people are the best in their field. Beating
everyone else is actually quite rare. Unlike most sports, a cross country meet
doesn’t end with one winner and one loser. Most meets have ten or more teams,
with as many as a hundred or more runners in a race. At the start of the race,
there are usually fewer than five runners who have a shot at winning the whole
thing. With so many competitors without a chance of winning, success in
cross-country is defined differently than it is in other sports. To succeed in
cross- country is to beat your own best time. I remember once, as a new (and
slow) high school runner, my coach being more excited about the minute I
chopped off my time than he was about the varsity boy who came in third.
Cross-country taught me to compete against myself—to not worry too much about
the line of runners either in front of or behind me. They had their races to
run, I had mine, and we came to the starting line with different abilities and
goals.
Cross-country
taught me not to be afraid of pain. Running fast for a short distance is fun.
Running fast for a long distance is counter-intuitive. The body sometimes
screams to stop. But cross-country requires runners to meet the pain head-on.
Runners learn how to embrace pain and how enter into it. Cross-country taught
me no worthwhile goal is met without some pain.
While pain
in cross country is physical, I believe that my years running in the rain, in
below-zero temperatures, and sometimes even while sick, allowed me to transfer
the embrace of physical pain to the embrace of emotional pain when I’ve needed
to. Three times my husband and I have had to give back foster children we had
come to love. Looking back on those experiences, I recognize that in my pain, I
nevertheless found a rhythm. I somehow found my place within the pain — to hurt
in the last quarter of a race is to honor the first part of a race well run.
Likewise, the hurt Bill and I felt in giving back our foster children honored
the love and good times our family had with those children.
Cross-country
taught me I won’t always have a fan base. High school and college kids do not
flock to cross country meets as they do to football games. The most important
parts of a race often happen in the middle of the woods, where there may not be
any spectators. Cross-country taught me about doing your best when no one is
watching, because even if no one else knows you slowed down, you know it.
Cross-country
taught me that there are uphills and downhills and you rarely have one without
the other. It taught me that there’s a time to work hard and a time to coast
and use gravity. Cross-country taught me about faith. Most of the time, you’re
running along not able to see the finish line and you just have to believe that
it’s there; that at some point, you’ll be able to see it.
Cross-country
taught me that if you fall in the mud or slip in a stream, it’s really not such
a big deal, because the race is long enough to allow for a mistake or two. Cross-country taught me that while a strong
start and a sprinting finish are helpful, more crucial is running hard for much
longer middle portion of the race.
Most
importantly, cross-country taught me about commitment. In the bang of the
starter’s pistol are a hundred runners’ unspoken promises to finish the race.
I
doubt that the middle-schoolers I coach will see their cross country races as
any sort of metaphor for life. I didn’t see the connection myself until I
stepped away. The ten- to fourteen-year-olds I coach will be thinking that all
they’re learning is how to run uphill, how to make it through a side ache, how
to slice a few seconds off their personal record. They’ll be thinking that all
they’re learning on the cross-country course is how to run a little faster each
week.
That’s what
I thought, too.
