Girls’ Cross Country Hosts Mock Race

Girls’ Cross Country prepares to run.

Courtesy of Margo Angelopoulos/The Exonian

By Cooper Walshe ‘21 and Ginny Vazquez-Azpiri ‘22

Last Friday, the on-campus upperclassmen on the Girls’ Cross Country team ran the home course in an intra-squad mock meet. As all races have been cancelled this fall season, the athletes staged an intra-squad mock meet. 

Coach Dale Braile noted that the meet had an unconventional format. “They were timed on two parts of it—the second mile,and the last half mile,” she said. “This gave them a chance to get reacquainted with the course and to think about it in pieces rather than as a whole.”

This run helped runners—new and returning—familiarize themselves with the course, after a six-month hiatus from students being on campus. 

In order to follow the strict COVID-19 guidelines on campus, the team came up with families for runners to train and race in. The families are similar to dorm units, a system splitting students within a larger dorm structure. Runners have trained in their respective families for several weeks now. During the meet, families were sent off the line one by one, staggering the release by twenty seconds to give some room between different families.

Although the circumstances are not ideal, the team has maintained a positive attitude to make the best of their situation. “We’ve tried to recreate the feeling of meet by wearing uniforms, playing music on our post-meet cooldown, having snacks provided by the day student parents and, of course, cheering as everyone finishes,” senior Helen Lieberman said. “Even though our circumstances are different, the team still has the same encouraging, supportive feeling that makes it so special.” 

“We cannot judge our success by comparing times with our competitors. Instead, we will judge our success by a combination of the bonds made between teammates and individual improvements,” Braile added. 

Lieberman highlighted a specific bonding exercise done by the team. “We have a lot of great traditions that we can still do, even socially distanced. For example, returning students read letters that we wrote to our future selves last year, and new students receive letters written by last year’s seniors,” she said. “We also have dress-up days every Friday, which are always fun.”

Even without the duel meets against other schools in their league, Girls’ Cross Country has also been able to keep healthy competition. “I think it was quite nice to have a mock meet just to get a general estimate of where we are in our training. I took this as more of a workout than a meet because of the set-up of the 5k,” senior Leila Herman said. “For me personally, I felt like this was a lot less stressful than normal meets because there wasn’t an aspect of needing to compete against other schools.”

The team is optimistic that restrictions will be reevaluated and loosened. “Many of our workouts, from long runs on a local rail trail to interval training on a nearby road, require going off-campus,” Lieberman said. “We’ve adjusted by doing more speed-based workouts on the fields, but it doesn’t quite replace our normal training.”

Even without typical resources, however, the team remains optimistic. “I think that during the rest of the season we’ll all improve a lot, and coach [Gwynneth] Coogan has some pretty hard workouts lined up for us, so this meet was a nice baseline,” Herman said. “I am definitely looking forward to meeting the lower classmen on the team soon!” As the Girl’s Cross Country season progresses, the team looks forward to mock races to come.