Hill country

It was the end of a grueling hill workout at Bowdoin Park – the brainchild of Coach Chuck Williams, one that I dubbed “hill smorgasbord,’’ touching on every tough hill on the Bowdoin course and beyond. It wasn’t a particularly long workout, but it was hard. Hills are hard. Perhaps you are aware of this. Hills build character. Hills are speedwork in disguise. Think of every coaching cliché about hills – they’re all true. Here in the Marist Running universe, we’ve never shied away from hills. We embrace hills. And, why NOT? It’s not like we have our own TRACK on which to spend time! Even Coach Horton with the sprinters during their early-season training right now … what are they doing? Hills. Character. Speedwork in disguise. All of that and more. I call the Farm Lane trail in Hyde Park, my personal favorite training venue (some of our runners don’t share this sentiment!), the “one stop shopping” for runners – uphills, downhills, turns, woods running with no traffic, soft surfaces – what’s not to like? As a coach, anyway.

But I digress (as usual). Back to the end of the hill workout I was starting to write about at the top: Last hill repeat, on the back hill. The athletes were tired but focused, energized and drained at the same time, all their senses keenly tuned to finishing this damn workout. Coach Chuck is clapping and screaming halfway up the hill. I’m at the base of the hill, nervously pacing, worried that someone else is going to trip and fall on a rock or a root. One of our veteran athletes, a tough runner, starts mumbling some names of opposing runners and opposing teams. Runners and colored jerseys that she wants to run down, on a hill like this, in a meet, sometime in the future. Names and teams. Runners and singlets other than the red-and-white Marist ones, which of course are the only ones that matter. Up the hill she powered, no doubt visualizing the names and teams, runners and singlets (non-Marist, of course!) that she will be hoping to run down in the near future. In my anxiety over falling athletes, on a humid late summer day, this scene was a thing of beauty.

Our sport, like so much in our society, can be governed by Big Data. We are bombarded with some much INFORMATION now, from a variety of sources – and most of the data is accessible on your wrist. It’s all good and as an old coach I would be a fool to dismiss this Big Data. But, as an old coach who has been through more cross country seasons than can be counted, this one runner reminded me – and reminds us all – that cross country running is very elemental in this regard: Beating people, with singlets other than Marist. Place matters, a lot. Times are important and can be useful guideposts. But the way they keep score is by place. So, when we are running up our endless hills here in the majestic mid-Hudson Valley, we would all do well to visualize passing people and beating other teams. Here in hill country, as fall and important XC meets beckon, that’s all matters.