Hillgrove Goes the Distance By: Maylene Michel

High schools across the nation have students looking forward to football, basketball, and soccer games all year. With this, many sports are overlooked, and Hillgrove houses one in particular that is just as physically and mentally demanding as all three: cross country running. Cross country running is generally described by EBSCO as “both an individual and team sport that involves racing over natural terrains, such as dirt and grass, instead of on a traditional track. Races can feature a variety of surfaces and obstacles, including hills and water, and vary in distance based on age, gender, and competition level.” Hillgrove’s cross-country runners have had their ups and downs throughout their respective journeys, but these journeys are more complex than one may think.

Runners from this school have vastly varying beginnings. One long distance runner, junior student Eli Balentine, shares that “both my brothers did running in middle school and my dad just kind of had us getting into running,” and he’s been at it ever since. Conversely, third year varsity runner Angel Moreno reveals how he “had a friend in middle school that ran, and he told me I should try it out and join, so I did, and I was pretty good at it. I liked it, so I just decided to stay.” But no matter how these athletes made it to where they are, they enjoying running just the same.

Although, with different origin stories comes different mindsets. Walton High School in Georgia has a policy for their runners: “It is not part of the Walton XC culture to merely make the minimums. Runners should train enough over the summer to make the maximum of 7 laps (Girls) or 8 laps (Boys) in their 1st 12-Minute Run,” and Hillgrove runners have a comparable mentality. Adelaide Ellis, another third-year varsity racer at the school, informs amusingly that she enjoys “being sore, and being tired, [and] it's really easy to go to sleep anywhere and everywhere, which is a bad thing sometimes, but it's fun.” Many cross-country runners at Hillgrove would agree, and they would agree just as much with Angel Moreno. He explicates how “it taught me a lot of discipline… running is a lifestyle… we get Sundays off, but besides that, it's running every single day. You have to be willing to put in the work, not just go out there and run…,” and a mindset like this is crucial to have as a runner.

Be that as it may, high school cross country running isn’t always so intense; another huge aspect, especially for the Hillgrove team, is team bonding. Runners at Hillgrove prioritize running for their team as much as they do running for themselves. Angel Moreno explains that at harder competitions “it's not about, like, you know, you're trying to break your own record. It's really about just getting your team out there, you know. Placement.” In situations like this, sometimes a runner will run with solely the team in mind. Additionally, Eli Balentine adds that “whenever someone has a good race, I'll always try to get everyone to, like, get super loud. I always want to be the loudest team at awards.” Such actions show how tight knit the school’s cross-country team is. 

All in all, the cross-country team of Hillgrove is extremely dynamic. Runners put their all into the sport and are still able to converse about fun things like their music taste: “It changes. Week in, week out. I mean, it can be anywhere from the Beach Boys to Swae Lee, like it's all over the place,” says Adelaide Ellis about her hype music for track meets. In the words of Jackson Township High School in New Jersey, Hillgrove’s cross country runners know how to “have fun, train hard, and race well.”