George Alexander was somewhere new, all alone in front of a cross country race. He pulled away from the rest of the field in the red race at the Virginia Elite Invitational at Hanover County’s Pole Green Park, and he alone fought the wind that picked up throughout the day. He surged as he approached the three mile mark as the clock neared his PR of 15:52, crossing the line, flexing and expecting his time to be just under 15:50. The problem was, the was 5k.
“I guess I was mentally checked out,” he said. “I was ready for it to be over, and I was wondering why people were yelling at me to keep going.”
Alexander recovered and won in 16:16 with a 14-second margin over second place.
Bowen Shuttleworth left for Williamsburg last month, eager to join the dozens of young men from Northern Virginia who, over the years, made their academic and athletic marks while running for the College of William and Mary.
Last Thursday, he skipped a physics lab to make a mandatory track team meeting. There, Athletic Director Samanta Huge told the men’s indoor and outdoor track athletes that their teams, along with men’s and women’s swimming and gymnastics and women’s volleyball teams, would be cut at the end of the school year, attributing the decision to budget pressures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Huge abruptly hung up the video call, Shuttleworth said, taking no questions.
The weight of the ink on her cross country uniform was almost imperceptible, but it dragged Julia Clark down when she raced.
For three years, since the first time she walked into her high school as a freshman, the building taunted her. J.E.B. Stuart High School, named for a Confederate general.
But as a senior, wearing the simple J of the renamed Justice High School Wolves, she felt something she hadn’t for her entire track and cross country career up to that point – unmitigated pride.
Chantilly Coach Matt Gilchrist offers his thoughts on the nascent club cross country movement. This is a good reminder that RunWashington welcomes input on issues related to Washington, D.C.-area running on all levels, and if you have thoughts to share, contact Charlie Ban at charlie(at) runwashington (dot) com.
The sun rises over Burke Lake and it’s 7 a.m. on an August morning. We’re the first ones there, the first Monday of a new cross country season, with all the promise and potential that lies ahead. We are brimming with enthusiasm and filled with confidence and energy that is gained by a full summer of group conditioning, motivated for another successful fall season. This has been the same ritual that we’ve practiced year in and year out, but this year when August came, we stayed home. For the first time in my 25 years of coaching, there have been no practices at Burke Lake. Instead of heading to Lost River, W.Wa. for our annual team camp, we all stayed home. The motivation hasn’t changed and the hunger to run and to compete is still there, but in the world dealing with COVID-19, these annual rites of passages are chief on a list of things that we are missing out on.
There is no denying that our student-athletes miss sports. There is no questioning the benefit to them participating, just as we have debated over the best ways to re-open schools this fall. Running cross country (or participating in any sport) is beneficial to our emotional and mental health, our physical development, and being amongst teammates is a vital link to some level of socialization that many of us have missed over the last six months.
Kelly Deegan lives close enough to a park that almost every day, she sees organized sports practices and games happening. She also got a phone call from the Westfield High School administration, asking if three teenagers — who a local resident saw running together — were on her cross country team. She hasn’t seen her runners since March… they weren’t her runners.
That drove home her frustration about the fate of high school cross country during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“You want them to do it, but you also don’t want to be responsible for bad decision making,” Deegan said. “We’re in this limbo where we can’t do what we’re driven to do, which is help kids run.”
Though she put away her jumping spikes a few years ago, Lake Braddock alumna Maddie Manhertz Swegle is still flying through the air, this time in a navy fighter jet. On Friday, she will become the first African American tactical air pilot.
Though she was primarily a long and triple jumper at Lake Braddock and later at the U.S. Naval Academy, Swegle was willing to pitch in on the track too, including running a leg of the 2012 AAA state champion outdoor 3200 meter relay team that finished with a six-second lead over West Springfield in 9:20.9.
“My guess is that she enjoyed jumping more than she enjoyed the 400 and 800, but if we needed her on a relay, she was always in,” said Bruins Coach Mike Mangan. “That tells you a lot about her, doing that for the state championship. She was super team oriented and her teammate adored her. People felt good just being around her.”
- The Virginia High School League voted July 27 to delay fall sports, including cross country, to Feb. 15 – May 1, between shortened winter and spring sports seasons.
- The Washington Catholic Athletic Conference will not sanction competitions before Jan. 1.
- The Blue Ridge Running Camp is broadcasting nightly panel discussions with athletes, nutritionists and therapists.
- The District Track Club and Sharing Shoes will be collecting lightly used athletic shoes at the Formula Running Center 11 a.m. – 3 p.m. Aug. 8.
- The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments approved the plan for the National Capital Trail Network.
- Arlington’s Mike Wardian and Gu representative Ken Holmes will be the guests on Potomac River Running’s Instagram Live at 7:30 p.m. Wendesday, July 29.
- Keira D’Amato was a guest on the A to Z Running podcast.
- Masters runner Eric Melby was a guest on the Run Farther and Faster podcast.
A Walt Whitman runner is getting a bone marrow transplant, but will need help from blood and platlet transfusions.
Ben Lesser got a major boost in his fight acute myeloid leukemia when the National Marrow Donor Program yielded a partial match.
Try this again! The power of athletics! #WeRaise #wwtf4life @WWHSAthletics @mcpsAD @MCPSAthletics pic.twitter.com/CATLMlSDBw
— Stephen Hays (@WWXCCoach) April 15, 2020
Help Ben
Donate blood
You can donate whole blood every 56 days. Lesser can accept A negative, B negative, AB negative and O negative.
Donate platlets
You can donate platelets every 7 or 14 days. In D.C., at the Donor Center at Children’s National Hospital, you can donate platelets every 14 days. Around the country, you can donate platelets every 7 days at the Red Cross (see the Red Cross website). If you have ever been pregnant, you may need to have an HLA test first.
Send Ben a card or note:
Ben Lesser
6106 Harvard Ave. PO Box 607
Glen Echo, MD 20812
If you’d like to organize a group of people to donate blood, or if you simply prefer to speak to someone, please call the Donor Center at Children’s National Hospital at 202-476-5437.
Running again took a lot of faith for Vicki McGorty.
Despite a running career that went back 44 years and took her to the high school cross country championship and a collegiate career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as she launched herself in the air April 4, she wasn’t sure what would happen when she came back down.
“I was so excited but a little nervous,” she said. “When I go up in the air, is my leg going to catch me?”
It did.
She was nine months removed from a double knee replacement which repaired about seven years of damage that she pushed herself through.
Motivating high school runners is not always easy, even without a global health crisis going on. But with the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the world, preventing kids from coming to school-sponsored organized practices or attending track meets, keeping high school runners motivated becomes an even greater challenge.
Anthony Belber, head track and field coach at the Georgetown Day School, anticipates that it will be weeks until the team can reunite in person, something he acknowledges is going to be difficult.
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Coaches, athletes and parents are encouraged
“[In not having our regular season], we are being tested at this moment in a way which might be far more substantial than in a championship meet. We are being asked to show just how strong we are,” he said.
This challenge becomes even harder for coaches in Virginia. Last week,On Monday it was announced that there will be no track and field season for the rest of the spring season in the state of Virginia. Maryland and D.C. schools and sports are on an open-ended suspension.
Gina DeGaetano is the head track and field coach at Riverside High School in Leesburg. She knows firsthand the difficulties that this announcement brings, but is trying to stay positive in light of the news.
“The news on Monday was not what any of us expected,” she said. “I hope we get back to track rather sooner than later. I miss it. I think it’s important to note that as much as the athletes miss it, we (the coaches) miss it too.”
