Category Archives: cross country

Club Nats is Where It’s At

The second weekend in December was the swan song for the 2015 cross country season, with three separate championship events taking place in San Diego, Albuquerque, and San Francisco. 

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Book Review: The Animal Keepers

In the spring of 1985, Donn Behnke was a social studies teacher at Stevens Point Area High School in Wisconsin, and already a very successful Track and Cross Country Coach at the high school level. In nine years of coaching, … Continue reading

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‘This Beautiful Sport’

My running friends will be happy to know that I no longer have any excuse to skip mid-week track workouts, tempo runs, and hill repeats. Saturday was the last meet for the Concord Academy team, and so, as of this … Continue reading

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Youth and Its Discontents

Were we tougher back then? Maybe. It’s the first Tuesday in November and the last workout before the league championships. Today’s workout is a “T” run — team, tempo, and togetherness — and most of the team has, indeed, made … Continue reading

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Marking the Course: A Fable

Once upon a time, there was a young and successful cross country coach. She was intelligent and energetic. She devised training plans that challenged and developed her athletes. She was up on the latest trends in using strength workouts to … Continue reading

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What We Remember

Friday was the fourteenth anniversary of that strange and horrifying day. I was going to re-post something I wrote on the sixth anniversary of the day the planes were hijacked and turned into massively destructive weapons, but at the last … Continue reading

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The Cross Country Paradox

I don’t have a lot of time to write this morning, what with preparing for the afternoon’s practice and worrying about what makes sense for the sixty kids at my school who have shown up for cross country this fall.

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Book Review: First You Run, Then You Walk

“I don’t exactly wish to make the claim that running made me a grown up, but I know its arrival in my life coincided to some degree with my reaching that state of being. I started running rather late, right … Continue reading

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