The Magical World of Cross Country!
Every fall, young men and women get ready for cross-country season. It is an age-old tradition. What could be more primal and natural than young people running pell-mell across open fields and hills? Out in the wilds! Over hill and dale!
It’s a delightful sport which began formally with the British back in the 1800’s. Yes, those whacky Victorians again. Cross country became part of the Olympics in 1912 in Stockholm.
It’s a related but different sport to standard track and field events. The courses for cross-country range from fairly-tame and standardized grass and dirt 5K’s and 10K’s to some fairly-rough, obstacle laden odd distances.
Most of your famous middle- and long-distance runners had early careers in cross country.
I ran cross country in what we call High School in the US. I ran my last two years, Junior and Senior. In the US it’s a fall sport. This is where I learned how to run and began my relationship with endurance sport.
I remember quite fondly heading out for long training runs on the country roads around Groton Massachusetts with the team on beautiful, crisp, fall days after school.
I did not join the cross-country team because I liked running or because I had any innate talent. I joined because sports were mandatory at my school and the captain of the wrestling team, which was my main sport, was the captain of the cross-country team.
Basically, I joined cross country to get in shape for the winter wrestling season.
And, because of the paucity of runners and the way cross-country works I somehow found myself on the varsity squad.
It was all formative.
I loathed the races. They were just pain fests. Some were memorable, but mostly it was terrifying.
I loved the training. Every day after school heading out with the team for long runs in the cool fall weather. It was great.
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What are the components of cross country?
First you need a course. The courses are outside in the wild. It’s very common to have the cross-country course built into the playing fields, but they don’t have to be. They can be rough goat paths through the forest. These were always my favorites. They were more like a steeple chase than a cross country race. Jumping over logs, scrambling up hills and running through streams – Ah! The joy of it!
The distance of these races varies. For the most part younger athletes get shorter courses, around 5K or less and the older athletes run up to 10K. The prep-private league that I ran in had short courses and every one was different.
I think everyone understands individual cross-country racing. That’s simple. You have a bunch of runners, and they all try to win.
But it’s also a team sport and that’s where it gets tricky.
Your typical cross-country team has 5-10 runners. A cross-country contest is called a ‘meet’. You can have either dual meets, which are between two teams, head-to-head, or multi-team meets like league meets and championships.
How they score multi-team meets with more than two teams is interesting.
The way cross-country is scored is different than most other sports and a bit nuanced.
The team with the lowest score wins.
For each team only the top 5 runners for that team can score. The score for the team is the sum of all the individual runners’ scores. The runner who comes in first gets 1 point. The runner who comes in second gets 2 points, etc. all the way down the line.
So, your team can have the runner who wins the race and still lose the meet.
I’ll apologize in advance but we’re going to do some math.
Let’s say it’s a dual meet and your runner gets first place and then the opposing team takes the next 5 places. Your team loses 20 to 35.
Even if your team takes first and second, if the other team sweeps the next 5 places, you still lose 30 to 25.
But, if you take the first 3 places, called a ‘sweep’ you can’t mathematically lose.
You can see how this scoring becomes particularly crazy in a big meet. As 5th man on my team, my plodding around the course with a finish of 126th place, might just make the difference over some other team’s 5th man finishing 130th.
Which is kinda fun.
To complicate matters, even though only your top 5 runners get scored, your 6-10 runners can ‘displace’ the competition in a big meet by finishing ahead of the other team’s scoring runners.
Their scoring runners get pushed down the list into a higher place and it increases their team score. So, a league or championship race could very well be decided by the fat guy you made carry the towels.
No slacking! Every runner counts! Every place counts!
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If you can’t run in a cross-country race you should at least go volunteer or watch one.
Typically, all the teams are lined up across a wide starting line in individual corrals on a playing field, maybe a couple hundred runners wide. At some point, probably right across the other side of the playing field, the course will abruptly narrow.
This means that unless you want to get trapped behind the other runners you must sprint out of the gates to make it to the course before the other runners. This creates a crazy melee effect right at the start.
If the weather is bad, which where I live means mud, but in other places might mean heat and dust, it doesn’t matter. It’s part of the course. Deal with it. Which isn’t bad for the first few guys but gets dicey for us plodders in the mid-pack. If you’re the guy following a couple hundred people through a mud hole, or a couple hundred stomping feet though a dust bowl – you’re going to be the worse for it.
Since the races are relatively short, rarely does one runner ‘run away’ with it. It’s usually a grueling duel between a handful of great young athletes all the way. Very exciting. And to see these young athletes finish is something to behold. They give 100%.
It’s very exciting. If you would like a taster, you can watch all the big school meets on YouTube. I would recommend it.
So that’s cross country.
Go find a race to watch.