The Woodberry Harrier 2016: Volume 3

Running with Dignity

Form ever follows function.

--Louis Sullivan

A cross country season can begin with the greatest promise (as ours did at this year) and a coach still holds his breath through the first training surge.  Sometimes you think you’ve just made it when that first complaint (a sore shin, a throbbing knee) falls like the first slushy splash in that winter storm you were hoping would pass. This was our Tuesday after Fork Union, so we cancelled Mercersburg, rolled out the yoga mats, and filled the whirlpools. 

Once I would have seen this as a forced slow-down, but we took it as a reminder to take care and give care--which has to do with way more than calming inflamed tendons.  It’s about health, and health is about habits: sleeping well, eating right, drinking water, running the right way.  Habits aren’t just automatic behaviors.  They remind us how we see ourselves and what we are all about.  

In no way is this more dramatically true than in running form.   Bad form will wreck your race and, over time, it will wreck you. You’ve got to get the energy vectors flowing the right way and minimize the torque and strengthen the stabilizers.  A strong cardio-vascular system in a shaky frame is like an over-sized engine in a weak chassis, as a coach friend put it.   Bolts will shear, rivets will pop, you’ll end up in a ditch.  

But in a far more profound—but equally literal—way, your form is the way you carry yourself.  It’s the way you carry your weakness, and it’s the way you carry your strength.   Your form is the embodiment of your intention and your attitude about that intention and your commitment to it.   It holds your determination and your pride and your confidence and your courage—who and what you are in this hour of your life and how you are resolved to face what life is throwing at you right now.  In other words, good posture means a lot more than mere proper alignment.  A Zen master summarized the 1001 reminders about meditation posture by saying simply, Sit with dignity.   Yes, that’s it: Run with dignity.  

Run, too, with stability, which means a lot more than stance control.  It means being unflappable

under duress; it means a calm, response when you might prefer to quit or scream or both at once.  In the just same way, relaxing means not just conserving energy but being flexible, resilient, and elastic when nothing is going your way.   Most important of all,  leaning in means a whole lot more than proper foot strike.   Last week we spent some time down at UVa with expert sports physiologist Eric Magrum, and at one point he said to one of the guys, Lean in and bite the air!  That’s right:  Lean in and bite the challenge.  Run right at it.  Chase it down.  Take a piece out of it and spring in for more.   That’s what good form is all about.

And we were in very fine form three days later at the 41^st Annual Woodberry Forest Invitational, which we won for the first time since 1994.   Some of the squad were so eager they went out way too fast and suffered for it later in the race, but still they held on and stayed together and pushed hard all the way through.  I was very proud of them.  Here are the results:

Woodberry Forest Invitational
Woodberry Forest, VA
24 Sept, 2016
1st out of 21 teams 1-5   spread: 50 sec 1-7 spread: 1:32
Varsity Race	Time	Place out of 172
Carrington	17:47	4th	9-sec. course PR
Rich	18:15	8th	12-sec. course PR
Clark	18:26	11th	First race on the course
Singleton	18:33	14th	First race on the course
Jacobs	18:37	16th	15-sec. course PR
Watt	19:06	27th	First race on the course
Tydings	19:19	33rd
Lindner	19:28	39th	First race on the course
Wall	20:43	93rd
Kacur	21:07	110nd
JV Race		Place out of 132
Duke	20:32	7th	9-sec. course PR
Sompayrac	20:34	8th	1:57 course PR
Dearborn	20:38	9th	1:34 course PR
McKay	21:46	20th	First race on the course
Richard	DNR
Ross	DNR

And this past Friday we hosted Episcopal High School for our traditional dual meet.  The long drought having broken the day before, we raced through drizzle on a soggy course, but we had several standout performances nonetheless:

Woodberry Forest vs. EHS
Woodberry Forest, VA
30 Sept, 2016
1st out of 2 teams 1-5   spread: 54 sec
Varsity Race	Time	Place out of 17
Rich	17:57	1st	2nd course PR in a week
Tydings	18:27	3rd	27-sec. course PR
Singleton	18:36	4th
Lindner	18:44	5th	44 secs under last week
Clark	18:51	16th
Jacobs	19:11	27th
Kacur	20:33	33rd	34 secs under last week
JV Race		Place out of 23
Duke	20:09	1st	28 secs under last week
Sompayrac	20:30	2nd	4 secs under last week
Dearborn	20:53	3rd	15 secs under last week
McKay	20:21	4th	25 secs under last week
Carrington	DNF
Wall	DNR
Ross	DNR
Richard	DNR
Watt	DNR

This Saturday we run in the big Albemarle Invitational at Panorama Farms in Charlottesville.  This is our last big, fast meet before the championships, so wish us luck.