Cross country is one of the many sports students of Rolla High School enjoy. It’s a running sport similar to track, and athletes can take part in multiple distance events. As a sport, cross country requires a lot of discipline and a lot of willpower to be able to succeed.
“You have to be willing to go through the pain a little bit during the race, like, sometimes I can’t wait to finish, but we have to do it,” stated Freshman Cameron Martenson.
Coach Rhett Cook had similar thoughts to the mental side of the sport.
“Yeah, [runners need] a lot of mental toughness. A lot of people when they think of the fact that you’re just running a mile, they’re scared about it. But most definitely those kids…get over it,” stated Cook. “We start by running miles. And then by the end of the year, they run four or 5,6,7 miles. They’re like, ‘Oh, this is actually pretty easy,’ but it’s a big mental thing.”
As with all athletic teams, the cross country team has different warm-ups and workouts they do during practice.
“So every day we do the exact same warm-up, we do a mile warm-up. We’ll either do it here around the whole entire school or we will jog to the track and then we go through a set of dynamic stretches that take like 10 to 15 minutes, and then that’s like the workout phase,” stated Cook. “So we’ll have like two workouts a week. Sometimes like the other days we’ll do regular runs that vary between three and five or six miles for kids, just depending on the individual kid, and then when we’re done, we stretch and do core work.”
Depending on the team’s performance that season cross country’s season can last for a bit longer than intended, that means that it could potentially have an effect on the well being of the players
“So we range anywhere between 7 and 10 [meets]. If you count districts and states and all that, well, we’ll get into the ten and eleven mark,” claimed Cook.
Cross country has a pretty good sized team too, compared to the other sports at RHS.
“We’re really pushing right 30. We got 12 Girls and 18 boys. There’s a couple extra too that we’ve gotten to add on. So we try to stay above 30,” said Cook.
The team still has openings though, and according to Cook, he recommends anyone to join the team if there is interest.
“That’s what my big thing is. Cross country is not just a sport that you do in high school like some other ones…Running is a lifetime sport,” said Cook. “[Runners] will have to be competitive with it…I always recommend people to do it even if they just want to try it out. It’s amazing, tell them all to come out”.