View Workout (Liam Albrittain)

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CDXIV

November 2, 2013 (Morning)

Exercise Type: Run

Comments:
This was one of the strangest meets I've ever attended. I found it almost impossible to get emotionally excited throughout the week and inwardly groaned that we'd face a slow course. Upon arriving I realized that I had given a concert there when I was 13 for a jazz camp. I had no idea that one could use it as a cross country course. Everyone's morale worsened after we jogged it. People positively scoffed at all the pavement, the odd, repetitive layout and the inconvenient hills. I couldn't even admit that it had a few, beautiful grassy stretches until I ran. I sat around and moped for a bit, knowing I probably hadn't done everything to prepare. But the mood changed a bit when the girls got third behind Visi and Sidwell. As we warmed up, my stomach felt upset, like I had eaten too much breakfast. Race time came along and as I took off my sweats and got to the line, I thought, "Well, I like doing this, I should just stop complaining just because it isn't glory days." I did the striders and felt a great deal friskier, ready to compete. Even my dad came to watch. We set off on the uphill finish and into the woods and I found myself in the top ten, fairly close to Aids and Colaizzi the younger. They went ahead, but I hung onto the other public schoolers around me. We came through the mile in 5:57. All of a sudden, Sidwell's top 4 converged on me and surrounded me. Anthony implored me to let the pack pull me along, but as we came up another hill around 2000m in we began to get strung out. Approaching the 3k, though I broke up their pack, having battled with them on the downhills. I never saw three of them again. Only Patrick Landsdale remained ahead. Coming toward two miles I felt nice and relaxed and heard 11:38. I found myself alone and trying to hang onto Patrick. He definitely did not know how to run downhills, but I simply couldn't close the gap while we ran through the longest paved sections. With 1000m to go I tried to pick things up and finished 6th in an anticlimactic, but respectable 18:06 (Aidan won in 17:34 and we had done 5.5 miles yesterday, etc.). It was a great bonus that we actually won the meet though! We acquired a golden shoe trophy from Mayor Vincent Gray and free sweatshirts. Anthony deservedly got coach of the year and Jackson a freshman if the year award! I was glad to see Sam, who had to run this like a workout so happy with our victory. Even though we trained through this, I would argue that no one else took it quite as seriously. Fun day on the whole though--still high quality cross country.