By Emerald Briggs
While it seemed like the rest of the world was at the Manchester Invite on Saturday, Newfound once again traveled north to the White Mountains Homecoming Invite. This was our first time coming to this meet for everyone except our few seniors. Not so surprisingly, many of the team were sick during this race (if not then, now they are), but we still had a great time. In the girl’s race, we won overall with 5 girls in the top 10. Even though some guy told us “hard right” during the race (it was a left), Emerald won the race with Ceili in a solid second. Addie (5th) came in next for the team with Charlotte (6th) not far behind. Sophie had a great race coming in 8th. Captain Josie had a good finish coming in 11th, and Reece rounded out the team with 15th place. Loving these packs! Fun fact, our packs are called “sleuths” since we are The Bears. And even better, it was a t-shirt race meaning 5 girls and 2 of our boys took home an awesome shirt.
The boys had a good race as well, finishing 2nd overall. Colin ran to a 2nd place finish, running under the previous course record. Brady (another dual-sporter) ran great for his first cross-country race, getting 5th and a top ten shirt. Wyatt (12th) had another good race, ever-improving. Despite some hardships, Ben showed severe determination and great perseverance in finishing this race. Even though this team is young, many good things are to come.
On Monday, we had our regularly scheduled long run. This time, LaPlume wanted us on the fit trail in New Hampton. About a mile run from the school to reach it, it’s a trail with two different loops, one about a mile long and the other about a half mile. Following the title the “Fit Trail,” it appropriately has multiple stops along the trails with exercise equipment, but we didn’t practice those on this specific day.
Since we were supposed to have a meet on Thursday (spoiler alert: it didn’t happen), Tuesday was a more tame speed day of 300m cruise intervals. These cruise intervals are run on our “grass track.” It is a constant run with 300m at a perceived intensity of 7 and then 100m easy. We were told to run 6-10 of these. After the run, we had a grizzly bear workout to perform.
Finally, it was Wednesday; the day the whole team had been looking forward to. It was pre-meet day which meant LaPlume Wars, and this time it was a Strava map design contest. Acting as our judge, Davio was back on the Newfound Campus to film. The girl’s team planned a design earlier in the day to attempt, but the boys winged it. After many twists, sharp turns into the woods, and Reece falling into a hole, the girls ended up creating a ghost, pumpkin, and a bear for Newfound (and trying to get extra points from Davio). The boys created a crab on their map. Davio had four categories to judge us in: creativity, quality, composition, and general goofiness (all 1-4). After much anticipation, it was time for the reveal. In creativity, girls got a 4, boys a 3. Quality followed the same outcome with girls earning a 4 and the boys a 3. In composition, the boys scored a 4 and the girls a 3.1… Finally, in general goofiness, the boys took it with a 4 and the girls a 3. Ultimately, the girls squeaked out the win with a final score of 14.1 to 14. The two factors that resulted in the +.1 which led to the girls’ win (according to Davio), were our creative hole-y glasses (all found on the side of the road) and the fact the entire team blindly followed each other right up a hill into the woods. After the winning announcement, we had a pre-meet talk and the start of planning for our homecoming lip-sync. During Strava drawing, the girls recorded our ritual pre-meet interviews, took some amazing pre-race .5 pictures, and forced Davio to take our BeReal.
Thursday we were supposed to travel to Belmont for the Jeri Blair Invite, but sadly to everyone’s surprise
the meet was canceled due to weather. This put a pause on the girl’s reunion with our friends, the Mascenic girls. Of course, knowing the nature of our sport, we still practiced despite the cancellation and ran a tempo-negative split run instead. We were allowed to run it either on the track or running complexes. This run was 30 minutes in total, every ten minutes increasing your speed. The girl’s team ran in style in our matching pickle Chicknlegs shorts and our new shirts (thanks to Addie’s mom!). Following the run, looking like wet rats, the team made our way into the weight room to do a lift and some core.
Finally, “Fun” Friday arrived. On Friday we had a more aggressive workout than the past 2 speed days this week. After a 10 minute warm up, we had an 800, 3x1k, 800, 2×200, then a 10 minute cool down. These were all run on the grass track and between each rep we got 60 seconds rest. First 800 was at a perceived effort of 7, we had specific goal times for the 1ks, and then the goal for the last 800 was just to be faster than the first. The two 200s were meant to simulate a kick at the end of a race.
