The essence of cross country

'tis the season ...

It occurred to me, on an impossibly perfect Friday morning at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, that numerous readers may have never experienced the unique nature of cross country running.

Many readers took to running as adults. It was not a “sport” for them in high school and in college. In high school and in college, “cross country” is THE running sport. In the fall. It’s unique, it’s beautiful and good heavens it is HARD.

Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx is a mecca for the sport. Those paths, grass fields and back hills are oozing with running history, going back decades and decades, generations and generations. This is my 34^th year coaching the sport. Prior to that, I ran cross country in high school and college. In the brief interval between, I covered cross country as a sportswriter. So, I’ve been around Vanny, and so many parks, fields and hills like it, for the past 45 autumns (excepting, of course, 2020).

On a sunny and breezy Friday morning, a few minutes before our Marist cross country team was about to join about 300 other runners at the starting line for the 115^th annual IC4A Championships, I found myself drifting aimlessly toward the starting line where eight young men would be wearing a Marist uniform that has meant so much to me for the better part of the past five decades.

My mind wandered to a former runner, Greg Salamone, who loved this place and was so good at grinding out the ups and downs of the original 5-mile course at Vanny. Greg loved the area so much that after graduation, he didn’t return to his upstate home but rather moved to Marble Hill, a section of upper Manhattan/Bronx that is very close to Van Cortlandt.

Greg died 10 years ago, at the too-young age of 35, from melanoma. I think of him often, but always, always, always when I’m at Van Cortlandt. It sounds implausibly corny, but I do feel that Greg’s spirit still lives in our team.

I do believe there is a spiritual nature to cross country. It is different from track, and it’s nothing at all like road racing. It’s dirt paths, grass fields, trails, hills. Most importantly, it is a TEAM sport. One runner can have a great day, but he or she needs to be bolstered and buoyed by their other teammates. The top five runners on each team score. The team trumps the individual. Place matters more than time.

Because of this, the best teams form a camaraderie unique to the usually individualistic nature of running. Teammates train together, travel together, eat together, stretch together, lift together, socialize together. And, if all goes well, race together. Cross country forms a brotherhood and sisterhood that is difficult to explain in mere words. In our team tent and team huddle, the word “love” is sprinkled into our sentences liberally. We mean it. We feel it.

I’ve been truly blessed to have coached hundreds of young men and women through the years. Their sweat and their emotions are fixed in time at a place like Van Cortlandt Park, and it stays with me, and I believe it stays with them. It stays in my heart, and in their hearts. It lets an old coach’s mind wander to 2001, when a skinny, bespectacled kid named Greg from upstate New York gave everything he had on the hills and trails of Vanny.

It's cross country season for a few more weeks. The crisp air. The leaves falling. Maybe even some chilling rain and snow toward the end of the season. A muddy pair of spikes, racing singlets covered in the detritus of hard effort for 20 to 30 minutes. This is the essence of cross country: Effort, teamwork, tears of joy, tears of despair. Mud, sweat, tears. We can learn a lot about life in those fields and trails.