After putting up what is by far my worst season of running to date, my Cross Country career is exactly where I left it at the end of last year- the graveyard. I had killed off my high school turn at the sport with a string of mediocre performances culminating in the two worst races of my life. While incredibly depressed at the time, I was glad to move on to the track a few months later, knowing I'd have an opportunity to try again in the sport come fall 2018.
Well, fall 2018 has come and gone, at least in terms of my XC season and I somehow find myself in that exact same position. Except unlike last year where I produced a slew of mediocre but at least somewhat respectable performances, my races this year were truly atrocious. I only raced 4 times and had one good race, where the other three were a combination of being embarrassing, pathetic, and soul crushing. While the season was overall much worse than my 2017 season, I'm not quite as upset about it as the stakes were so much higher last year. But I am left scratching my head at why I'm so bad at cross country. I refuse to believe that I'm simply a terrible cross country runner and I don't belong out there, but there isn't much hard evidence in performances to back me up otherwise.
I once again am looking forward to track season and quite happy to say good riddance to another horrendous XC season. I'd be lying if I said that I accomplished everything I wanted to on the track in high school, but my Cross Country disappointments exceed my track ones by some margin. Over the last three years, I've run much more consistently out on the track, rarely ever bombing extremely important races the way I have time and again in XC. The idea of running laps around an oval is much more boring on paper, but having a place to run fast without any additional barriers (hills, terrain changes) over a variety of distances seems to be more of my strength. I should like cross country much more than I do, but I find it significantly harder to maintain a race pace after starts that demand an incredibly fast first 800m and over much slower terrain including hills. That doesn't exactly explain why I run horrible in XC but not in track, as I have put in a decent amount of great XC performances as well.
A common question in the world of HS running is Track or XC? Which one is better? Cross Country used to be the easy answer for me, but after putting up these kinds of races, I lose almost all interest in the sport. I then get through track without any of these disappointing races, so right now, track is highly enjoyable to me and cross country is not.
So what is my relationship with Cross Country? I used to have a strong XC experience, where like track/road racing, if I put in the work, I'd get good races out. After a tough end to my 2016 season, I figured these were just anomalies in a mostly great XC career. But after a disappointing 2017 XC season that just simply didn't have those good performance like before, my career wasn't looking too great. And now, after my worst season yet, it's a pretty even split between good seasons and bad ones, almost leaning towards the bad side.
It's incredibly depressing to continually go through this. I long to be good at Cross Country again, but I don't know when that will happen. It'll be nice to have almost 10 months to recover from the disappointment of this season. With three seasons left, I'm hoping next year will be a return to form.
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