Examining Campus Cults: XC

A cult, defined as a group of people who religiously worship an object, activity, or person to a degree considered by the general public to be strange or even harmful, could describe the entire Exeter student body. Our veneration of any table even remotely oblong-shaped; our propensity to pack ourselves into a room twice a week, fingers aggressively and incessantly snapping; our adulation of intellectual challenge and masochistic rigor and simultaneous shunning, in the name of GPA, of teachers and classes rumored to be hard, along with our ostentatious contempt for “Harkness warriors”; and our unquestioning hatred of Smurfs, all would be viewed as strange by any reasonable (or sane) outsider.  Within this common cult, however, lurk sub-cults whose practices are considered extreme even by the standards of a wacky student body at large. One of the best known is the cross-country program. Between the boys’ and girls’ teams, there’s a lot to be explained: Why do they charge through the Academy Woods in costumes unconducive to athletic activity, such as cats, dinosaurs and sharks (the last of which, at least, is not normally associated with swiftness on uneven ground), startling unsuspecting dog-walkers?  What happened to those who mysteriously disappeared after translating “Ache Te Vitu”? How to account for their perennial success when they obviously spend most of the season planning their E/a hype videos? Smiling to reveal their freakishly perfect teeth, Lucy Gilchrist, Grace Gray and Hanna Pak assured The Exonian that, all rumors to the contrary, the XC teams do nothing but run.