I know her!

I was looking at an ad for the Nike Human Race today and realized that a girl from my high school cross country team is featured in the ad!  She ran in college for Cornell and, from what I hear, she now runs for Nike.  How cool is that?!

On our high school cross country team, she was the girl that went to states.  She was a great teammate though, always very supportive and encouraging of us slow pokes.  She’s one of the reasons I fell in love with running actually.  I realized how supportive the sport was and how you’re racing against yourself more than other people.  At races, she would finish far ahead of most of the team, but go back out on the course to run the last half mile with our last runner or stand at the tape cheering until every last one of us had finished.  I had never been on a team where the best athlete was so encouraging of the least talented athletes and never showed frustration with our, shall I say, lack of talent.  Even though she was clearly the star and we all knew it, she was no diva and the coach didn’t put her on a pedestal.  I loved that cross country team and that’s a huge part of why I run today and love running so much.

I remember before my first cross-country meet, my good friend and I were really, really nervous, but she told us not to worry, that we’d never come in last because there are always really slow runners out there.  Naturally, I came in 3rd to last and my friend came in 2nd to last.  And boy were we psyched that we finished without walking!!  The race course was on another high school’s campus and featured two huge hills that the students had aptly named The Dominator and The Masturbator.  Ahhh high school memories.  Those were some tough hills though.