CA on the Podium

I stood alone at the back of the Governor's Academy gym, where rows and rows of folding seats had been set up for the awards ceremony following the New England Prep School Div III Championships. All of the boys and girls from Concord Academy were sitting in their assigned section, close to the podium. Some of the boys had changed into jackets and ties, something I had never seen them do before. The reason for their unusual choice of attire was the possibility -- only a possibility, since no results had been released from the race run several hours before -- that CA had been one of the top three teams, an outcome that would mean a trip to the podium, a plaque, and a chance to bear back news to the school that the team had earned its highest-ever finish at a New England championship race.

It had been a really good season -- a historically good season for the Chameleons. Unfortunately, although we had peaked well and run our best times at the league championship meet the previous week, we had been beaten by a better team from Beaver Country Day School. I fretted that the kids themselves wouldn't realize what they had accomplished, so I was glad we had one more chance to do something special.

It was maddening to have to wait for results, without even quick scoring to give us a clue about how we had finished. I had seen enough to know that Groton, with four in the top ten, had won the team title, and I was fairly sure that St. Mark's had finished second, well ahead of us, but it seemed to me that several teams, including CA, had a bunch of runners finishing between 15th and 40th. It had been impossible to count how many from each team. And it didn't help that the team I was most worried about how uniforms the same color as the team that had dominated.

As the meet director began reading the names of teams in reverse finishing order, one part of me was busy preparing myself for the bad news that we had missed out by some agonizingly slim margin. I knew if that happen I would spend the next year thinking about whether I had prepared each runner to race for every available place. But another part of me knew that the kids had run well. They had run really well, and smart, too.

The course at Governor's Academy is mostly flat for the first 1.5 miles, with several short, steep "speed bumps" that wreck a runner's momentum and sap energy from the legs. After another short hill to 3K, the course crosses a covered bridge and begins a long, twisting climb through woods South of the campus. After the climb, the course descends through the woods for a bit, passing the 4K mark, then run back down a service road back to the covered bridge. The final 700 meters crosses the center of campus, rolls down to the fields, and ends with about 350 meters around the fields and to the finish.

I believed my team was one of the top three teams in the race, but I kept saying there was no reason to prove it in the first 1K. Having had the recent experience of going out hard at Franklin Park, they decided they didn't want to make the same mistake on a tougher course. For my part, I said that whether they went out fast or went out slow, they had to have complete confidence to see their strategy through. If they went out slow, they would need to believe that they could move up through the field and not be discouraged at an early deficit. If they went out fast, they couldn't use that as an excuse to give up when the hills came.

Fifteen seconds after the gun went off, it was obvious which strategy they had chosen. They were all near the back of the field as they ran across the first long field, and as I watched, I hoped they knew what they were doing.

At 1K, they were still a little buried in the pack, but not too bad, and I could see that they were taking the opportunities given to them by the course to pass a runner here or there. I saw them next at 1.4M. Arthur, my top runner, was in 19th, and the next four were in a large pack with runners in places 30-40. What I didn't know then, but was able to figure out later from some video shot by one of our runners who was not competing, was that we were in 6th at this point, and if the race had ended there, we would have had about 165 points.

In the final 2K, they had fought hard to gain back places. Most spectacularly, Arthur moved from 19th to 5th with 300m to go, and came within a couple of seconds of running down the 4th-place finisher. Our next finisher moved up from 34th to 18th. The others had all finished in the top 35. Would that be enough?

As the meet director announced the 6th-place team, my heart began pounding. When he announced the 5th place team with 160 points, I think I stopped breathing. He seemed to be speaking in slow motion now, as he said, "...and finishing fourth, with 149 points..." and then the name of another school.

And then we were next. He called for the captains of the third-place school, and our guys went up in their rarely-seen but suddenly appropriate blazers and ties to accept their plaque, and really, from the cheers of the other CA runners in their seats, you couldn't tell the difference between us and the winning team.

After the ceremony, when I finally got my hands on the results, I saw that it hadn't even been close. We had scored 107 points. We had been down 20 points at the halfway mark and had beaten the fourth place team by 40. On a difficult course, almost every runner on the team had been at or near a season's best. I was very proud.

So now it's time to wrap up the season. Arthur and Adam (our fifth) will be back next year, but the others are seniors and have run their last high school cross-country race. It's always hard to realize that it's done, and that there are no "next weeks" to set that PR or beat that rival team.

But one thing that makes the NEPSTA meet better than the MIAA championship meets is that there are JV races, and those races always give us glimpses into the future. In the JV race yesterday, one of CA's runners put on spikes for the first time and ran a minute faster than he had ever run before. I had mentioned to him in the days leading up to the race that the top 15 finishers in the JV race were called up and awarded ribbons. I figured he had an outside chance to sneak into the top 15, so why not? His response to the challenge was to run 19:11 and finish 6th, an astonishing time for a runner who completed his first race this fall in just over 24 minutes.

The desire to stand on the podium has that effect on people.