CROSS COUNTRY
2019-2020
Running changed my life.
Running has been ingrained in my life since before I was even born. My Dad is a lifelong runner and was finishing marathons before I was even a thought. I am not going to say that I always loved running—because I didn’t. In fact, I hated it for a long time. My Dad put me in cross country and track in middle school to help me keep in shape for soccer. I ended up being pretty good at running. Succumbing to the thrill of competition and the fact I was half decent I continued up until high school—but I hated the pressure, and it was frankly, very painful.
However, something in me switched after I was forced out of playing soccer after a fourth and final concussion. I was a junior in high school, I disliked my friends, myself, and I missed playing a sport. Cross country always lingered at the back of my mind as an option— I already knew most of the team from middle school and it was something I knew I would be good at. My senior year, I decided to join the team. From the first practice, it was an instant infatuation. I felt, for the first time, I actually belonged somewhere and was wanted somewhere. My Dad, who wasn’t able to run anymore, was elated. We bonded over times, paces, mileage, the art of racing, all of it. Here, I learned to love running. It is where I met my best friend and all my closest friends—still to this day.
Alana after the Woodbridge Classic, September 2019.
Hope comforting Teagan after the Woodbridge Classic race in Norco, California, September 2019.
In the book “Running Practices,” Lindsey A. Freeman describes the release found in running to come from “a desire to touch something beyond or within yourself that is difficult to access when still.” They say, “to run is to move and be moved.” Running is a form of moving, but it is also a form of desire and vulnerability. There is a desire to feel others feeling you, for those to see the pain and also feel it with you. It is indulgent in the pleasure and weirdness of having a body, being in touch with your body, and being perceived as a body. I’ve broken down sobbing on runs. Sometimes it touches something so deep inside, that there is no other way to access it. In running, you see each other at your very worst and very best, and thus, has led me to find my lifelong friends.
To see the distance you’ve run is difficult to physically see, but that is to not believe you’ve actually run that distance. That is the special and whimsical thing about running. Your body is the medium and the means of belief. It registers the mileage, the time, and the pace. It even registers someone running right next to you, but never physically touching you.
As I continue to run today, I continually find the poetics of running within and throughout its order. To run is to glide, to run is to feel, to run is to touch pain and endure it, to run is to touch each other, to run is to touch nature. Funny enough, running was labeled as one of the few “non-contact” sports I was safe to play. But, I don’t think it is contactless at all; in fact, running seems to touch everywhere and everything.