#youngrunner

Skip your #boring work Holiday party and come rage with us!

I can tell you're worried. We've only finished the warm-up and you're not sure if you can run another step. The two loops around the soccer field, sprints (we call them strides, but I know that for you, today, they were a sprint), crunches and form drills are more exercise than you've ever done, and now you're wondering what might be in store for you and the rest of Group Six.

Group One is doing 7 miles and surging the hills, which will take longer, so that's why they're getting their workout first. If you like this, and you stay around, you might well be in Group One or Two someday. If you really love it, not just the running, but the delicate balance between solitude and camaraderie, and have the patience and the humility to keep at it, you'll be in Group One by next fall. Don't worry about what the senior girls are wearing. That's just stuff you can buy, and it won't be cool for long anyway. But you should get some running shoes. The indoor soccer shoes you're wearing today will make it even more likely that you're not just going to ache, but hurt, after practice. You chose the sport because you didn't make the volleyball team and heard we don't make cuts. It's true; we don't. We don't have to. By the end of the season, some of the freshmen will have quit, some will have invented injuries, some will be relieved at the league meet to cheer rather than endure more painful minutes, and one will be in the top seven. Between now and then, though, you'll change. Maybe you'll lose the weight that left you terrified of flag football in middle school PE, or maybe you'll run, with that weight, farther than most of your classmates ever will. You'll experience intense pre-race nausea on the way to each dual meet, and you'll laugh until your face hurts on the bus ride home. When the team wins the league meet, the thrilled first-year coach, fresh out of college, will insist on carrying all of the team's bags. When you try to carry your own, because you didn't even run, he'll refuse to let you. And you'll feel like part of a team. You'll get nervous for the banquet. Although you know you won't win any awards, deep down, you'll hope against hope that maybe, somewhere for improvement or even just suffering-through-it-ness, there's an award for you. You'll try to keep a calm, disinterested face and you'll almost succeed in keeping your bottom lip from quivering when the freshman award goes to someone else. Later, you'll have exhilarating races and you'll have heart-crushing disappointments. Some of this disappointment will be genuine, and some, you'll know, even at the time, is adolescent showmanship. You'll score points at the state meet and, later, a year will go by when you don't PR once. Your cross country team will win the state meet by one point, and then, a year later, without having graduated a single person in the top eight, will finish a distant second. In this time, though, the warm-up will have become just that. The daunting run assigned to Group Six will have become the pre-meet trot, a route so easy it feels like you haven't even run. You'll probably always hate strides, or at least, doing them in front of the football team, finishing well behind runners you know you could trounce in a race, your shoulders high, and arms pumping, but never quite getting the hang of turnover. At graduation, your teammates will be among the few people you're truly sad to leave, and for years, when some of you run in college, and even more of you return to your parents' homes each summer, they'll also be the only people with whom you keep in touch. And, at 29, when you've been coaching a team of your own for years and are beginning to wonder how many more Saturday mornings you want to spend hearing a gun go off, it'll be these people, the teammates you missed homecoming with, ate pasta with, whose parents watched you run mile after mile around the disintegrating track, whose bags your young, stunned, thrilled coach also carried, these young runners, that you want to write.