End Of Regular Season Brings Memories, Fun Times Together
10/27/2013 12:00:00 AM | Cross Country
EDITOR'S NOTE: Gonzaga University junior Alison Fraher will share her thoughts on the 2013 cross country season in a blog that will share her personal experiences and those of the team throughout the season.
By ALISON FRAHER
Gonzaga Cross Country
Last weekend in Lewiston was the last of the regular season, with only conference and regionals left (and nationals in the future). For some of our seniors this was their last cross country race ever, but it's hard to be sad about that since most of us have two more seasons together.
To get ready we had a team pasta party on Friday night at Becca's (Barad) house. That was a lot of fun! It's so nice to relax with the team, and talk about fun things like our favorite Halloween costumes as kids. Apparently the team is very creative, costumes varied from Sriracha Sauce to an Ewok to Rubber Band Woman. On a related note, we filled out personal bios last week that may go up on the website, and those were a hoot to read! Once we had all filled them out, Patty (head coach Ley) set up a game where we had to match the answer to given question with the teammate who said it. We have some pretty interesting people running here at Gonzaga.
We had to get up pretty early the next morning; the bus left at 6:30, and almost every one slept on the ride over. A lot of parents came out to watch this race, which was really sweet. Even though mine didn't come (but I will get to see them next weekend!) it was cute to see all the families together and to see how happy it made my teammates. It helped out on the race course too, having someone yelling "GO ZAGS!" every 5 meters.
The race was interesting. The course changed from last year, but all of the changes seemed good. They rolled the dirt so it wasn't as loose which made it faster, eliminated the uphill finish and even tried to plant some grass. The grass might take a few more seasons to grow in, but I can see a lot more potential in the course.
We had to get out hard off the start line this race, since the course bottlenecks pretty quickly. I started in the second row of our box, right behind Lara (Tuthill), who is quite a bit taller than me, so she can establish place a little better than I can with her size. I'm not really sure what happened after that, it may have been the bottleneck, or the tight corner, or something else, but I slipped right through without losing any speed and suddenly I was in 5th. It was a little surprising for a few moments, but I didn't worry. Actually, the thought that went through my mind was "this is what Lauren (Bergam) must feel like all the time". And then I remembered that I wasn't too far off of Lauren when we were doing some repeats at Mission Park last week. So I hung out up front for a while, and then Maggie (Jones) came up alongside me. I haven't actually raced with Maggie that much this year, she usually starts a lot quicker than I do. She was so encouraging, really taking some risks to break up the pack in front of us. She did just that too, and I got dropped a little.
But I wasn't alone for long, because Katy (Culver) and Lara were right there too. The three of us really fed off each other well and traded leads for most of the next two miles of the race. That was the best part of the race for me, getting to race with them. For the brief moments that we did get broken up, it was so helpful to have (coach Pat) Tyson around, yelling off "Zags are in 11, 13 and 14!" or wherever we were at those points, so I always knew we were close. We finished the race with an 11 second spread between our 1 and 5 runners. I was pretty excited about that, since we've talked a lot about closing up our top pack. Granted, we were missing Lauren, Amelia (Evans) and Zoë (Urcadez), but I think even with them we would still be close. We didn't win though, so the next step is to take that pack and just shift everyone up a few places.
Hopefully all of this will click at conference. There's been a lot of improvement and a lot of learning going on this year, and I can't wait to see it pay off!
