True to their distance-minded selves, cross country teams definitely play the long game throughout the course of the season.
Each week offers a new set of objectives for the runners, who approach everything with the end goal of peaking at the biggest postseason meets.
The Center Grove boys, for example, plan their every move around being at their best for the state meet in Terre Haute on Oct. 30. Currently ranked third in the state, the Trojans have the highest of aspirations and have planned accordingly each week, strategically resting runners while also building depth.
Boys coach Howard Harrell has run his full varsity lineup just three times this season — once at the MIC meet against No. 4 Carmel and twice on the same LaVern Gibson course that the team will run at state. He held all of his top five runners out of the Johnson County meet and ran just three of his top eight at last Saturday’s Franklin Sectional.
Harrell plans to switch his lineup around again this week in an effort to prevent anybody from getting too stale. In the meantime, he’s also been running the Trojans pretty hard in practices; they’ll start to taper off after Saturday’s regional, resting up for a difficult Shelbyville Semistate that features four of the state’s top seven teams and seven of the top 17.
“There’s not much competition in our sectional or regional,” Center Grove senior Raef Sauer said, “so we’re training hard in practice, and we hope that can translate over to state. … After regional, we’ll be going pretty easy. It’s just a little bit of buildup these next two weeks.”
For some runners, the buildup began much earlier in the season. Franklin girls coach Ray Lane knew his team needed to build depth behind top runner Lauren Klem, and he was counting on a number of inexperienced girls to fill those roles.
The payoff has been huge in recent weeks.
Freshmen Kathleen Lacy and Ainsley Botkin had their best performances of the season in leading Franklin to county and sectional championships, and juniors Abby Demaree, Amelia Tisdale and Eran Treibic have assured that the Grizzly Cubs can usually score pretty well in the fourth and fifth spots as well.
“We really just kind of took our time earlier in the year, bringing people along slowly, and now that we’re getting close to the end, you start to see them freshen up and have some of these big days that they’re starting to have,” Lane said. “It’s what we do now. The way we raced (at sectional) is what we’ve started to do all season. Lauren just goes out and does her thing, and we just race really tough from there.”
Lacy said that figuring out how to navigate the course and pace herself across 5 kilometers took some time.
“At the beginning of the season, I was a good runner,” she said. “I felt like I was in shape — and I just could not figure out how to run a 5K, how to go the pace, where to start going fast, stuff like that. But as the season goes on, with each meet, I figure out how to run each K, where I should start getting faster and stuff, and it’s really been working out for me. I feel good.”
The process of ramping up for that final meet is one that Harrell has tried to master over the years, and he’s gradually come up with a system that works; the Trojans finished fourth in the state last year and hope to top that later this month.
“It is a learning curve, because you learn something one year and you add that in the next year, and it all comes together,” Harrell said. “But now it almost seems second nature to us; we’re not adding in five different things. … They’ve been through the process, so they kind of know.”
