ESAA Cross Country Cup: A First Person Perspective

By Kaarthikan Mayouran

On Thursday, the U13s had our first cross country race of the year at Harrow School. It wasn’t too cold that day and I was raring to go. The course was 2.5km in total for Year 8’s – last year, a couple of my friends did the exact same race and from what they told me it had some hills, but in fact it was quite flat the whole way. In cross country, hills are extremely painful, and slow down your momentum a lot, so it was good to hear that there were only a few.

Our team consisted of Noah L (2G), myself, Aizhou S (2B), Vivaan K (2J), Ethan C (2G), Filipos M (2H), and Thomas F (1W). Our squad was extremely strong, and we were quite confident that we could make it to round 2. In this cross country, the top 4 in your team scored points for whatever place they came, and the team who had the least points won (e.g. if you came 1^st, you would earn 1 point). As my 3km time was 11:36, I was hoping I could run below 10 minutes due to some of the hills on this course.

We waited at the start line for a couple of minutes (which is always very nerve-racking and overwhelming with lots of runners) before the honk from the horn set us off. At the start, unless you get out quickly, you are always boxed in by all the runners and with the year 7, 8, and 9 girls running with us it made it extremely hard. My starts aren’t usually that great as I always conserve my energy for later, so I think I had around 40 people ahead of me in the first 200m.

However, as I normally do, I started to pick off quite a lot of the people and by halfway I was around 20^th. After the halfway mark there was an extremely annoying and steep gravel hill – although this drained me a bit, I still felt in great shape and rhythm during the race and kept pushing on. We reached another hill which went beside a bit of farmland before turning right into the home stretch (which didn’t have any hills, and the path was very smooth) with around 750m to go.

 In this position I was in 9^th and quickly moved into 8^th but there was a huge gap between me and 7^th (around 15 seconds). I was able to close this gap slightly but still finished around 10 seconds behind 7^th with a time of 9:29. First place finished with a blistering time of 9:01 but I was still extremely happy with my time.

Noah, our dominant runner, unfortunately picked up a hamstring injury with a kilometre to go, meaning he couldn’t be on the points with us. However, we still had strong positions with Aizhou coming 13^th, Ethan coming 22^nd and Thomas doing great for his age group, coming 2^nd in the year 7 category. With 53 boys racing in total (around 150 boys and girls) we were all quite happy. Overall, it was a great performance and hopefully we can qualify for round 2!