A different kind of fall

The view doesn’t change much from the parking lot. But then again, if you look closely across the river, it most certainly does.

This is a different kind of fall, an autumn without cross country – at least in these parts. There are teams and conferences that are still running. Our neighbors at the U.S. Military Academy are playing sports, running cross country meets, business as usual in their own regimented bubble. The Power 5s are training and racing; they play by a different set of rules than the rest of us, apparently. Most of the rest of us? We’re just training; no racing. And here at Marist, all of our training begins and ends from campus. For the first time ever, there are no vans going to our wonderful off-campus venues. We meet in the McCann Center parking lot -- toward the west side of the building, overlooking the Hudson River, away from the entrance to our beautiful new renovated building, mostly out of sight, backpacks strewn along the new sidewalk and newer landscaping, masked athletes chatting and stretching in anticipation of a same-old run. It’s usually about this time of the year, when the leaves start changing, that I wax poetic to a mostly ignoring young cohort of runners about the brilliant fall colors – at Farm Lane, at the Roosevelt Historic Site, at Vassar Farm, at the New Paltz Rail Trail, at all of our many off-campus venues.

Now, we send the athletes off and we stay in the parking lot, maybe sip some coffee and check our email, maybe go for a masked walk, and depending on the day, definitely venture over to the sprint team practices at various other locations on campus. The view from the parking lot doesn’t change. But then again, if you peer closely and far enough across the Hudson, past the cars, across the railroad tracks and boathouses down below, you can see some trees changing colors over there in the hills of Highland. A different kind of fall.

No meets, no off-campus practices, what do you do with all your free time on the weekends, my mother asks over the Alexa Show device in our kitchen? In “normal” years, our autumn weekends are often spent at home anyway. We usually only have cross country meets every other week, and frequently on Fridays. The grind of travel is felt more during track season. But still … this is a different kind of fall. We’re training, but we’re not playing cross country. Instead, we’re playing a waiting game, biding our time for whatever season beckons in 2021, all the while grateful that today we start our sixth week of in-person classes, a milestone few thought we would reach.

As September blends into October and the leaves change and we sit in the parking lot or take a walk or go check on the sprinters, we realize that this is all most definitely unusual. The leaves still change, brilliant shades of red and yellow and orange, impervious to the changed world around and among the trees. A different kind of fall.