Athletes of the Week: Kirsten Hyer and Caroline Luff

By Henri Liu and Toby Chan

Squaring off at the start line, senior and Girls’ Cross Country co-captains Kirsten Hyer and Caroline Luff prepared for their Red/Grey event. Last Saturday, Exeter teams competed against each other in place of the annual E/a festivities, which was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Hyer ran for Team Red, while Luff donned Team Grey gear for the race. 

Both captains did not start running competitively until their time at Big Red, but their careers quickly took off from there. While Luff ran in middle school, she also played soccer as a side sport. “I played soccer my prep year and then I did winter track,” Luff said. “I really liked the team because a lot of the preps on the team did winter track, and I was like ‘Oh my gosh, I should do cross country because it’s so much better.’” 

Hyer had a similar experience. “I also ran a little bit in middle school, but I didn’t do cross country my prep year either because I hurt my knee, so I couldn’t run prep fall. Same as Caroline, I did winter track,” hyer said. “I also did spring track and really liked the team and environment and I decided to join Cross Country lower year.”

The team environment that motivated them to both join was described by upper Lindsay Machado as “a community that bridges the gaps between ages, running experience and abilities. It’s an environment that values genuine support for your teammate. It means running together to compound your energies instead of running to compete against them”

Hyer’s experience mirrored Machado’s. “For me, it’s the team dynamic and how supportive everyone is,” Hyer said. “Everyone on the team is really great, and we have a lot of fun, but we also like to know when to work hard and get things done with a workout and stuff. There’s always a really good balance of work and fun.”

“Something about running that’s weird is that it makes people really close, and our team is a very close team and we support each other,” Luff said.

When asked about her favorite part of the sport, Luff described the mentality of running. “It is definitely a huge mental sport. It’s not like any other sport in the fact that it’s literally just yourself and your shoes, and you have to push against the thoughts in your mind saying ‘Oh, I can’t go faster for that last mile,’” she said. “It really takes a lot of tenacity, I would say, and you have to put your mind to it. You can’t go into a run or a race, thinking, ‘Let’s see how it goes.’ You have to have goals and be determined to reach them and keep on pushing.”

Luff also spoke of the collaborative nature of the sport. “It’s really just how, if you have someone that you’re running near, it’s really good to push each other because, when someone starts dropping back, the others can encourage them to keep going by pulling forward, and it switches because, if the other person is struggling for a few minutes, now you’re the one supporting them,” she said. “The teamwork if you’re running with someone is really great.”

To clarify her point, Luff pointed to the final race of her and Hyer’s season, in which they ran together for the majority of the race. “It’s really fun being a co-captain with one of your best friends, and it’s really fun having that connection and then also getting to be captain together,” she said.

Girls’ Cross Country is a sport which, at Exeter, has some very unique traditions that play a large role in the runners’ experiences. Due to the pandemic, they were unable to perform quite a few, but Luff still listed her favorites. “We always have dress up days every Friday. And like different themes like animal themed, Halloween themed, animal day, rainbow day and colors day,” she said. “Now, there are a lot of them, every Friday basically. It’s just like fun for people to come to practice and dress up”

“I’d say the season was definitely different especially because a lot of those weird cross country traditions that we normally had were different or like just nonexistent at all,” Luff continued. “We can’t go to Dame Road or run off-campus, but I still think Cross Country was really important this season to have because people wanted to get out their rooms, and they wanted to see their friends. I think we really focused on the relationships we’re building and try to make it as fun as possible, but it definitely took some creativity on the captains’ and the coaches’ side too.” 

In addition, all interscholastic races and events were canceled. To adjust, Cross Country turned to team time trials to track progress and stay competitive. “I guess not having races to push ourselves against and to not have goals like interschols or E/a was tough—because usually our team is like one-for-one at Interschol, we’ve been defending champions for two years straight,” Hyer said. “We always want to push to win Interschols and that’s usually a big goal, and not having that is weird because we didn’t have that goal to push towards as a big team.”

Still, the team persevered throughout the season. “I think we did a pretty good job because we had time trials on some Fridays or we had big workouts,” Luff said, “And did a 5k simulation race at one point and just replicated. We would have these time trials and workouts that served as benchmarks and things to push against. I think that was helpful, but it was definitely weird not having many races to motivate yourself for.”