The Woodberry Harrier 2011: Volume 2

Routine Rituals and Ritual Routines...

There are no windows in the cross country locker room. The dank scent of sweaty socks fills the air.  Spikes have chipped the concrete floor, and rubber heels have rubbed pale spots into the grey paint.   The corner is piled with cast-off shoes.  But, at risk of using a cliché, I think of this room as a passageway. 

         
It is a place between the life of Woodberry proper--the academic realm, the dorms, the Dining Hall--and the world of Cross Country.  It into this room that the last boys stumble, minutes before the 3:45, and from it that I chase the stragglers as Mr. Hale appears outside on his bike or in a bus or an old pickup, yelling for us to hurry.

   
There is no need to discuss the niceties of the next few minutes.  They are always the same, an unchanging routine, a command for Eric to get off the bench, a lecture on the importance of the week, an explanation of the workout, and sometimes another lecture on eating right and sleeping.  But this routine leads into something else which is not routine at all—or rather it is when routine becomes ritual.  When we begin running, we are no longer merely athletes going through a routine. We become runners, and runners become, for a brief time, the rhythm of the pace, the length of stride, the lengthening of breath, the steady push.  There seems to be so little difference between the two words that my thesaurus lists them as synonyms, but the barely visible difference is what makes this sport worthwhile.

          
This difference, this slight, oh-so-fine boundary, is one which most people miss.  The difference is that ritual is magic.  Not in the way of black magic--although sometimes Yoga seems to channel the occult--but rather in the way that a ritual provides and contains an other-worldly sense of purpose.  A routine is important, but a daily habit is not a ritual.

          
Last spring a friend remarked to me how the air was at Woodberry seemed cleaner, and I thought of my love for the stars at night and how I usually study in the library purely for the sake of seeing the stars on my walk back.  He said he had never noticed. 

           
On one of the last runs of camp a few weeks ago, several of us ran out of the woods in a cluster, passing from a dense forest into a wide valley.  Only the clouds seemed to define the boundary between earth and sky.  Someone let out a breathless “Wow”.  

          
I guess there is no better word I could useto define how I see cross country.  I would like to think it is merely the poverty of the English language, but in fact it is probably my own incompetence with words that leaves me unable to better describe this thing I consider to be sacred---from the portal of the locker room into the woods and back to the stretching tree and the  ice baths and back through the locker room.                       

            -- Addison Winston '12


The rituals seem to have worked well of late.  We have had some fine practices, from our "strength corner" in the Barbee to the steep hills across the river to the Mitchell Road, and the good work is showing.  We competed in the Woodberry Forest Invitational last weekend, and we ran very well.  The boys were proud of how the had done, and they should have been.  Here are the results:

Woodberry Forest Invitational
Woodberry Forest Golf Course
17 September, 2011
Place:  6th out of 23 teams 1-5  spread:  51 seconds
Runner	Time	Place out of 213 runners
Evans	18:15	20th	a 15 sec. WFS PR
Shelton	18:24	22nd	a 6-sec. improvement from Chancellor
Grantham	18:42	33rd
Rafield	18:43	34th
Winston	18:55	42nd
Liles	19:06	51st	A 43-sec. improvement from Chancellor
Flory	19:39	77th	A 1-min. PR from Chancellor
Ways	20:02	88th	His first 5K!!
Gimbert	DNF
Kuhnel	DNR

This Saturday we travel up to Mercersburg, PA, where we will see some huge teams (some with over 100 runners) and some powerful talent.   Wish us luck.   (If you are planning to making the trip, we run at 12:45 and 1:00).