The Woodberry Harrier 2013: Volume I

Whipping off into the Dazzle

How many cross country seasons before the thrill, as BB King sings, is gone? How much can be left to see and know? How many times can the blood quicken at a starting gun?

I must confess to wondering something like this as I approached my umpteenth early camp. Hadn’t I bought that shirt? Didn’t I have a whole trunk full of them? Then I remembered that Faulkner re-read all of Shakespeare every year, probably right in the middle of dog days in Mississippi — before air conditioning. I have a friend who rereads Moby Dick every other year, whaling chapters and all, and another who teaches Catch-22every spring. How many times you can you stroll through the French Impressionist rooms at the Met or listen to Doc Watson sing “Tennessee Stud” or watch The Wild Bunch or eat a fresh tomato pie or climb Pike’s Peak? Dr. Johnson said, “When you tire of London, you tire of life,” and so it is with all great works — God’s and man’s alike. But we often seem to forget that. We imagine that we wouldn’t want or need to go back — until we go back. Somebody mentions All the King’s Men and we nod with offhanded confidence because we have, as they say, done that and we remember the plot and most of our general impressions.

And sometimes I can be tempted, drifting in the flat water of early August, to think of a coming season that way. Somebody asks me what I expect, and I offer some commonplace like, “We’ll see…,” and all the while I am thinking that I can already see: We will bond, we will work, we will suffer setbacks and disappointments, we will move through waves of doubt and exultation, we will defy odds and expectations. Yep, been there, done that, etc., etc.

Of course, if you are lucky enough to open All the King’s Men again and let yourself just beginto reread that first page, you will be seized by wonder and swear you never laid eyes on it before. You will jerk awake and gaze ahead in awe at that brand new road rising in the morning sun, feeling the irresistible pull of speed against the fear of the blind curves and ditches ahead. At the end of the passage Warren says, “…if you wake up in time and don’t hook your wheel off the slab, you’ll go whipping off into the dazzle and now and then a car will come at you steady out of the dazzle and will pass you with a snatching sound as though God Almighty had ripped a tin roof loose with his bare hands.” That the plot you vaguely remember is, in many ways, just the frame that holds the dazzle.

You go off to early camp thinking about paces and progressions and workouts and rosters and wondering how we can catch whichever team we are chasing that year, and you forget that all of this is just a frame that holds the dazzle. And then there you are in a basement kitchen listening to a crackling radio watching some senior teach a freshman how to chop onions. There you are on narrow gravel road watching them come through the rain into the clearing. There you are looking across a long dam and watching them coming off the ridge on the other side. There you are around a campfire listening to them talk about why they are glad to be here. And, yes, somewhere in the middle of all that you feel as though God Almighty had ripped off the tin roof with his bare hands — not to scare you but to show you that big blue sky out there just waiting for you to get out there under it.

And that about describes the way I felt coming back from Bath County week before last. The previous Thursday evening I had looked around my classroom and wondered whether this motley little group would make a real honest-to-God team, and, after four days of running and talking and stretching and cooking and laughing, there was little doubt left about that. The only question was this: What could we do? Camp had been so good we didn’t want to leave, but we were eager to get to Panorama Farms and see what we had in a race. A long run on a forest road is one thing, but racing the Charlottesville horses in the Ragged Mountain Cup would tell us if we had anything.

I expected some respectable finishes, but I really didn’t expect that we would get 6th place out of 21 relay teams (just 3 seconds behind Charlottesville High) with two in the Top 25, Hines Liles (25th) and Robert Singleton (14th). It was the perfect way to end what had been a perfect early camp.

Four days later we opened our season at the Fork Union Invitational in a large field of impressive teams. We entered our top seven in the elite race, and I am glad we did. We didn’t finish as well as we would have in the main race, but the competition drew out some excellent performances. Here are the results:

2013 Fork Union Invitational (3-mile course)
Hardy Cross Country Course, Fork Union
7 September 2013
10th place out of 15 teams
	Time	Place out of 104 runners
Robert Singleton	16:24	21st	down from 17:55 last year
Hines Liles	17:19	50th	down from 17:44 last year
Billy Osterman	17:36	58th	down from 19:23 last year
Perry Hammond	17:37	60th	down from 18:12 last year
Cameron Finley	17:52	68th	1st varsity XC race ever
Averett Flory	18:23	85th
Church Humphreys	20:57	99th	1st XC race ever!
		Out of 226 runners
David Dameron	19:45	110th	down from 20:54 last year
Brandon Neath	20:13	124th	down from 20:29 last year
Parker Jacobs	21:59	195th	1st varsity XC race ever!
James Carrington	DNR
Jared Engh	DNR

And after a busy first week of school, we hosted the 38th Woodberry Cross Country Invitational on Saturday. We had a truly perfect day for racing: clear blue skies, no wind, and kindly warmth just south of heat. The weather seemed to inspire some amazing performances:

2013 Woodberry Forest Invitational
Woodberry Forest Golf Course
14 September 2013
3rd place out of 14 teams
	Time	Place out of 158 runners
Robert Singleton	17:15	3rd	down from 18:39 last year and a 13-second WFS personal record
Hines Liles	18:04	13th	down from 18:26 last year
Perry Hammond	18:33	24th	down from 19:36 last year
Billy Osterman	18:48	27th	down from 19:44 last year
Cameron Finley	18:50	31st	Down from 24:06 last year and an all-time WFS personal record!
Averett Flory	19:47	65th
David Dameron	20:13	79th	down from 20:49 last year
James Carrington	20:24	87th	First WFS XC race!
Brandon Neath	20:57	108th	down from 21:38 last year
Church Humphries	DNR
Jared Engh	DNR

Yes, they went whipping off into the dazzle on Saturday, and if you'd been there you could've heard that snatching sound.  It was sure something.