Hello. Today I'm writing about Cross Country so far this year.

I recently started Cross Country again just a few days ago. Practice is from 8-9:30 so I get up at 7 to get ready. I just wear a tank top, some shorts, and running shoes because it's still blistering hot. Otherwise I just bring water, my phone, an armband to run with it, and earbuds to listen to music. I listen to all types of music when I'm running but mostly it's rock or alternative.

The first thing we do when we get there is run two laps around the school to warm up. Before the actual work out we do a lot of stretching to get us loose and prevent injuries. Sometimes after the workout we'll do a cool down run that is much less hard and finally we'll stretch again and maybe put our legs up on a wall to drain them of acid. We've done workouts so far. The first thing we did was mile repeats on the track.

Four loops around the track is a mile so mile repeats are just listening to your time each loop and trying to keep it as consistent as possible. The next workout we did was Out N' Backs which is a very hard workout where you run at a good pace out to a cone in the middle of a field in the sun and run back to the starting line 10 or so times. After that we did a cool down of striders on the field which is just trying to lengthen your stride as much as possible. Because Out N' Backs were so hard next we did an Indian Run which is much easier. For the Indian Run the guys and girls lined up in separate lines and jogged in a square and when the coach blew his whistle the line would shuffle even slower and the person at the back would sprint all the way around the square and back to the front of the line. Lastly we've done a sprint workout where we were on the track and we would sprint the straightaways and walked the turns which was decently hard.

So that's been Cross Country so far. Bye.


- By Ashton