Cross-Country: The Season of Choice

by Marc Bloom

To be honest, I always preferred cross-country to track. In my crowd, this is like saying you love one of your children more than another. But most track fans have never professed their choices because it was understood: they were track nuts who cared little about cross-country, which offered a fall break from real running and, for crying out loud, was so lacking in uniformity. To these fans, track was all about numbers and fueled by an endless array of stats. They regarded cross-country just above race-walking on the sport's food chain. Oh, these poor souls.

I think I favored cross-country from the beginning because I was pretty lousy at it in high school but found I could hide in the hills, even stopping to walk when it hurt so bad. By the time I finished the good runners were on the bus eating their lunches and we were all going home. On the track, when I screwed up in a mile relay, it was witnessed by everyone and my split was announced like my citizenship: it was who I was.

Cross-country was more ambiguous. I could tell even then you got something important out of it no matter where you finished. In track you got a rep: you were fast, or you weren't. In cross-country, you got an experience. The darn thing was too big to grasp all at once. It needed to be savored, contemplated, massaged, dissected. Long afterwards, you'd be drawn back to it, to small part that still was not fully understood but worth considering like a good novel.

I started a cross-country newsletter in the '70s. I put it out mainly for myself, but people responded (not that many of course; not enough uniform stats) and I found there were track fans like me who thought that the difference in every cross-country course was a beautiful thing, and comparing performances from one site to the another was worth arguing about just as much as any set of "greatest" track performances.

So in the late '80s, I got this crazy idea to rank the nation's high school cross-country teams in my newsletter. Coaches from the middle of nowhere said that no one knew their teams existed until I ranked them. It went on from there and I started serving as a national clearing house of cross-country info, helping one ranked team compete against another from a distant state. Then, people told me they were going to create new invitational meets and invite teams I ranked from around the country.

We were all crazy. We loved cross-country. We knew it had profound implications for any runner, even the seventh man or woman or someone like me who couldn't even make J.V., and if we could just figure out how to elevate the sport and give kids recognition for their hard-won efforts, wouldn't that be great.

Then the Internet took the whole enchilada sky-high, and soon enough, with all the results at everyone's fingertips, my rankings were scrutinized as never before. I'd never really known if the 20 th best team was superior to the 21 st , but now there were people everywhere poised to deliver increasingly informed verdicts. And the question was always debated: Who's number 1?

Finally, in an ideal merger of pure cross-country and corporate virtue, the Nike Team Nationals high school invitational will answer that question in its inaugural event in Portland on Dec. 4. I have to admit my bias: I'm part of the group working on the event with the Nike folks. But I don't think I've ever been involved in a more promising project. While Nike may be an in-your-face pro sports conglomerate, its soul is still in running, and this event is emblematic of the sensibility that drove Nike in its humble beginnings. NTN is very Pre.