Every year, we begin training for the upcoming cross-country season a week after the current track season ends. Our runners are given one week away from running. We literally tell them NOT TO RUN! Do anything other than running. For one week, they get to step away and take a break, but maintenance is more manageable than rebuilding, as with so many things in life. So typically, in the last week of May, we give our athletes a training schedule to follow. Then, we kick off training in earnest through our summer running club in early June. For six of the next eight weeks over the summer, we meet four to five days a week and work out for three hours early in the morning and two to three days a week for another hour in the evening. The workload is doable but not easy, especially when many of our runner’s friends sleep late in the morning and play video games in the afternoon. We ask a lot of our athletes, but to succeed in the fall, we know they must work hard in the summer. When the first week of August rolls around, we begin training even more. We add time trials, weight room workouts, and Saturday runs. The workload increases even more as we near our first races of the season.
Towards the end of August, we start competing against other teams. We kick off the season officially with a dual with a neighboring team; then we host a cross-country relay meet, followed by our first 5k…a night race on a flat course that doesn’t really emulate true cross-country, but it is a fun event.
In September, we continue a heavy workload, training nine times a week and going to some of the biggest races we’ll compete in all season. Our runners get a little fried to be honest. Between the practice schedule, their school schedule, the races, their jobs, the never-ending heat of an Oklahoma summer, and just the general stress of life, our athletes and our coaches get worn out but then October shows up. Blessed, sweet, October.
October marks a significant shift in our training and racing. The weather starts to cool, the leaves change, and we begin to ease off the volume of work we do each week. This is a strategic move to allow our runners to recuperate before we enter our CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON. For us, this means our Conference meet against our local schools in the Tulsa area. This is the last race for our JV runners, so we make sure to celebrate their efforts. We then have our fall break, during which our varsity teams have the opportunity to rest before we head into our Regional meet, where we compete against half the teams in the state to qualify for the State Championship meet, which takes place on the last weekend of October.
When it’s all said and done, we train for that final race in October for twenty-three weeks (Jordan), 159 days, and over 500 hours. It’s a significant chunk of time, my friends. But it's also a testament to the dedication and hard work of the kids in our program.
Over all those weeks, days, and hours, we see runners do remarkable things, have terrible days, get sick, run personal records, get in trouble at school, do something incredibly kind for a teammate, win a medal, drop out of a race, have breakthroughs, have miserable season-ending injuries, have parents celebrate our program, have parents complain about our program, and always live to fight another day. There are so many ups and downs, and things always get messy because we’re dealing with people, and people are messy but the resilience of fighting through all the mess is what leads to championships.
My theme for our TEAM Cross Country camp this summer was “The Real Wheat.” “The Real Wheat” refers to a phrase from Patrick Sang, who is the famous coach for, arguably the greatest marathon runner of all time, Eliud Kipchoge. Coach Sang, in the book We Share the Sun, describes the process of harvesting the wheat, threshing the grain, and discarding the unwanted parts of the stalk until you get to the small seed that’s useful. He likens the process to training. Throughout a training season, runners are pushed and pulled, prodded, built up, broken down, and winnowed down to this tiny valuable seed that will take them into the season's most important races. It requires time and discipline on the part of the athlete and trust that the work they’ve put in will reap a reward. But just like any farmer will tell you, there are good crops and bad crops. The weather, an unlucky break at a crucial moment, or an unexpected obstacle can be the difference between success and failure. Doing all the work doesn’t guarantee success. It simply means you've given yourself the opportunity to succeed. That’s the rub. You must have faith that good things will happen even when you fear, and sometimes rightfully so, that it will all be for naught. We emphasize to our TEAM it's not the outcome that defines you, it's the journey and the lessons learned along the way, but that’s easy to say and hard to internalize, especially for a young athlete.
As we enter our Championship season, one of the most challenging tasks as a coach is to help our runners understand that the ups and downs, good races, bad races, good workouts, and bad workouts add up to the sum of success. It’s human nature to fall away as we near the end of a huge project. If you come by my house sometime, I can show you precisely what I’m talking about! After so much time and effort given to something, for whatever reason, we tend to want to give up right when we are on the verge of completing the task we set out to do. We forget how hard we worked to get there and instead turn away from the final summit. We reach the final push to the peak only to find ourselves too tired or scared of what it might mean to really go for it. What happens if we fail? What happens if all the work was for nothing? Each year, we see runners who’ve worked for months to put themselves in a position to succeed get distracted and become ineligible in their classes, get sick, roll an ankle, or just flat-out bomb a race because the pressure of standing on the threshold of success is too much. The fear of failure becomes more prevalent than the faith in the work they’ve put in. This is where the words of Coach Sang come in. We have harvested, threshed, and winnowed down to the end, and only the Real Wheat is left. My challenge to our runners, and even to our parents, over the next three weeks is to let go of any preconceived outcome and the fear of what might or might not happen. Instead, we rely on the work that got us here and the foundation of trust within our TEAM that we’ve done everything possible to prepare for the final push to the summit. We must simply stay the course and not let fear define our actions. It is faith in our training, faith in our teammates, and faith in ourselves that helps us discover what it means to be The Real Wheat. It’s CHAMPIONSHIP season my friends…LET’S GO!!!!
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