MAAC XC Championship: We're here.

The last two sentences of the last blog post from the last meet in which we participated as a Marist track and cross country program was dated Sunday, March 8, 2020. Here’s what was written:  

Great end to a great weekend and a great season. Onward to outdoors!

Oh, if only we knew.

Here we are, almost exactly a year later. March 5, 2021. In Galloway, New Jersey, near Atlantic City. Onward to outdoors. Literally, yes, this is true! We’re outdoors. It’s chilly and breezy. Here we are, at a most unusual venue for a most unusual championship in a most unusual month. Nothing usual about it. We’re wearing masks. We have two buses when we could have easily fit on one bus; this, of course, is because of social distancing, a term that few of us knew about on Sunday, March 8, 2020. On Friday, our women (11a) and our men (12 noon) will race in the MAAC Cross Country Championship. You know. The one we were SUPPOSED to have back on Halloween 2020? Yeah. That one.

We’re here. We’re not all here. But we’re here nonetheless. This is a smaller-than-normal travel squad, for a variety of reasons, Covid and otherwise. As we have noted, we have not been together, as a team in any capacity, in many months. But we boarded a bus, we did a pre-meet run on a golf course loop, we had grab-and-go dinners in our rooms, we’re wearing masks, we’re wearing neck gaiters, but we’ll eventually take them off, and we will race. What a long, strange trip it’s been, from Boston University on March 8, to Galloway, New Jersey on March 5. Don’t ask us how it’s going to go. Just know that, 362 days later, we’re really glad we’re here.