The Woodberry Harrier 2017: Volume 1

Seven states of what, I wonder….

If you drove around Middle Tennessee or North Georgia and Alabama forty years ago, you’d have passed a barn roof or two painted for Lookout Mountain’s most iconic tourist trap:  From Beautiful Rock City:  See 7 States.  You can still see a few faded ones.  Years ago a friend of mine picked up Eudora Welty at Lovell Field in Chattanooga to drive her to Sewanee for a reading, and as they wound up the valley past one of those barns, she said, Seven states of what, I wonder.   I remembered this the last time I got the question I’ve learned to expect at the water cooler at the beginning of each fall:  Is your team gonna be good?  What state of good, I wonder.

I like to say that a good cross country season is like a good poem: intentional, tight, musical, pleasing and profound.  A well-wrought urn.  But this is pretty glib, especially when the urn is finished and glazed and sitting on the shelf right next to the trophy.  A better comparison would be that working through a season is a lot like trying to write a poem: hard and messy.  You are following a grand vision but you take the wrong fork on the trail, you slip in the mud, you step in a hole, you want to quit.  You find the rhythm one day and then lose it the next and don’t find it again for two days.  But easy writing makes vile hard reading.   And easy training makes vile hard racing.

By training I’m not talking about just the workouts.  I’m talking about all of it, all the time:  the

bickering between the laughs, the sorry race that follows your breakout, the moments when you give up and the ones when you rise up, the queasy feeling before the kick, the doubting before the knowing, the embarrassment that somehow leads you to the pride, and the whole time loving it and hating it at the same time.  Seven states of being good and seven states of not feeling good enough pressed against each other like different colored slides, first one in front and then the other until it’s a dizzy blur.  

Facing this blur takes what Tom Wolfe called the right stuff.  And the runner with that (no matter what his PR) pushes headlong into it, not because he can see through it and not because he isn’t afraid--but because he cannot see and is very afraid and knows that the only answer for it is to lean in and go and speed up when he feels like slowing down.  He knows somewhere in his trembling gut that, as Padraig O’Tuama says, the only way beyond is through.  Which is another way of saying that you get it right only after you first got it wrong, that getting it wrong—and owning it—is the necessary condition of getting it right.   It’s what getting it right is made of, you might say.

Nobody has ever found courage without first being very afraid, the more paralyzing the fear, the more noble the courage.  Nobody ever learned to get up without falling down, the more embarrassing the fall, the more daring the rise.  Every hero felt like a coward once, and every hero knows he may well feel like one again. He’s a hero because he responds to that knowledge will all the vitality and hope he can muster--and with humility.  Not long ago one of the boys put it best:  I’m doing this because I don’t want to be flimsy.  This is where all the bravery in the world starts.

And that bravery flashes forth every day like wild flowers in spring---sometimes in great blooming patches (the team’s impressive showing at Ragged Mountain and at Chancellor), and sometimes single blooms here and there (the kid who pushed the workout without complaining about his cramp, the kid who says, “I messed up” without being prompted, the kid who starts passing people in the third mile when he’s hurting the most).  

I am blessed to live in such beauty every fall.  I think about the cross  country season the same way Aldo Leoppold thought about grouse season:  I sometimes think that the other months were constituted mainly as a fitting interlude between Octobers.

--BCH

It’s not October yet, of course, but our season has begun well.  We had an excellent early camp, where we came together well in our shared intention, and we are hard at it in the first phase of our training cycle. We have some aches and pains (some which worry me) but we are working as hard at staying well as we are at getting faster.

We had a great afternoon at The Ragged Mountain Relay running against all the Charlottesville area schools.

Here are those results:

Ragged Mountain Cup (2-mile relay)
Panorama Farms Earlysville, VA
29 August, 2017
1-5   spread: 1 min 1-7 spread: 1:59
Runner	Place out of 140	Time
Fletcher	4th	10:34	1st race for WFS
Watt	8th	10:47	14 sec. under last year
Rich	19th	11:02	18 sec. under last year
Clark	25th	11:13	5 sec. under last year
Singleton	38th	11:34	45 sec. under last year
Sompayrac	69th	12:05	47 sec. under last year
Daniels	85th	12:33	1st varsity race
Richard	96th	12:48
Open Race		out of  282 runners
Wall	5th	12:25
Dearborn	14th	12:57
Lindner	DNR
McKay	DNR

And we had an exciting season opener at Chancellor, where the pouring rain and the slick course didn’t deter us. 

Here are those results:

Chancellor Invitational
Fredericksburg, VA
2 Sept, 2017
1st out of 22 teams 1-5   spread: 59 sec. 1-7 spread: 2:19
	Place out of 186	Time
Fletcher	2nd	17:43
Watt	3rd	17:46	3 sec. lifetime PR
Rich	6th	18:09
Clark	12th	18:28	37 sec. course PR
Singleton	14th	18:42	37 sec. course PR
Daniels	44th	19:51
Sompayrac	54th	20:02	a 6 sec. course PR
Wall	82nd	20:42
Richard	83rd	20:42
Dearborn	98th	21:10
Lindner	DNR
McKay	DNR

And this Saturday we race in the Woodberry Forest Invitational against a large and formidable field.  Wish us luck.  The gun goes off at 9:30 AM.

P.S.  Should you be looking for The Harrier archive from past years, you will find it here:
https://woodberryharrier2016.blogspot.com/