Shortly after the start of the women’s championship race on Friday morning at 11a at the Seaview Golf Course, a pack of deer – maybe around 15 of them -- came sprinting maniacally across the field where just a few moments prior our women and the nine other MAAC teams in the race had sprinted away into the distance. They seemed startled, confused at the rather large gathering of humans, darting diagonally and jumping and sprinting – like deer tend to do. Then, panic set in on the minds of spectators like me (and, let’s face it, when the gun goes off, coaches are spectators just like parents, administrators, family, friends, etc). Holy crap, what if the women run right into the deer? What if the deer run right into the women? While this didn’t happen, it was a close call. And it was a completely random and bizarre event.
A completely random and bizarre event. That’s a pretty apt way to describe this cross country meet. A cross country meet, on March 5. A cross country meet, originally scheduled for Halloween, October 31, 2020. A cross country meet for a Marist Running program that hadn’t been at a competition of any sort, as a team, since a year ago. A completely random and bizarre event. Pretty apt to describe the deer, and really, this past year. Completely random and bizarre. There are many more descriptions that can be used. But that’s a good starting point for this discussion. Upon further reflection, after a few days to let this meet and everything it entailed sink in, we default to an emotion that we have been trying consciously to default to for the past several months, and that is gratitude. There is a laundry list of complaints and factors that worked against us heading into this meet. We can stretch all the way back to last spring (when our track season was canceled), last summer (when our 2020 XC season was canceled), last fall (when practice was stilted and truncated and the pathway toward an eventually canceled indoor track season was unclear), this winter (when we weren’t sure about this meet, when we could practice for it, when we could return to campus, if we could even go). Yes, in so many ways for so many of us collegiate athletics teams, this past year has sucked big time.
We can fall back on anger, we can whine in self-pity. And oh man, have we ever done that, and I’m the leader of that marching band. We can fall back on self-pity and anger. But we can also lean into gratitude. And that’s where we’re at. Just like in running, leaning in is far better than falling back as we navigate through the real world. The athletes I’ve talked to since the meet, they all echoed the same sentiment. Yeah, I coulda raced better. I felt lost out there. I know I had more in me. But man, it was great to put on the uniform, be with my teammates, hear my coaches and family and friends cheer me on. It was great to be back. Anyway. Something like that. So, we lean into gratefulness, gratitude. Again, it’s a practice I have been trying to cultivate and nurture these past several months, as some of you reading this may be aware. Swimming upstream, but trying hard to perfect my stroke against the swift current of bad news and bad breaks, some of which we still may be staring us in the face over the coming weeks and months, as we prepare to navigate through the potentially rough seas of an uncertain outdoor track season. For one day, we were back. We were grateful. We feel confident that there will be more days like this in our future. The road ahead looks more clear than the view from the rearview mirror. On Friday, we pushed in that clutch pedal and finally shifted into first gear. For much of the day, it felt like we were stuck in that gear. But it’s better than being stalled at the side of the road, as we had been for 362 days. And before long, we’ll be back in overdrive. We can complain, we can be pissed. We can also be grateful.
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