Race Report: 2021 USATF Club Cross Country Nationals

 Having determined the performance in the open race at the Eastbay Northeast regional "good enough," I tentatively decided to prolong my cross country season for two more weeks in hopes of additional recovery of the Achilles tendon and time to regain some fitness before the USATF club cross country championships in Tallahassee. Upon returning from New York, I signed up unattached for club nationals, essentially hoping not to get last place in the competition.

Unfortunately, despite neither increasing mileage nor intensity the following week of training, the Achilles did not recover well following the race at Van Cortlandt Park. The Saturday before nationals, the situation was looking bleak: the Achilles was still not recovered, but I needed a workout to flash some fitness to myself and justify making the trip. Remembering the response I got from the C & O canal surface two weeks prior, I drove to Point of Rocks for a short tempo run on the gravel. While the pace was respectable (~5:22/mile), I was grabbing my knees at the end of a 5 kilometer effort that was slower than my half-marathon pace a few months prior. But, the Achilles was fine after the increased intensity, so...

The C & O Canal trail at Point of Rocks

The Achilles' response to the gravel surface led me to run almost exclusively on gravel the week before USATFs, including a 10 x 400m workout (71-74 on all) on gravel that was, as my college coach would say, "a confidence booster" and led me to believe I might be able to do something respectable on Saturday. With no flare-ups the week of, things were looking good.

Taking the metro to the airport (and really seeing for the first time why people find living in a "big city" attractive), I flew to Jacksonville late Thursday night, picked up the rental car, and stayed in an Airbnb outside the city before driving to Tallahassee early Friday morning. I feel obliged to point out that the drive from Jacksonville to Tallahassee along I-10 is one of the most uneventful and uninteresting stretches of highway I have ever encountered...and that includes the drive between Boise, ID and Bend, OR along Highway 20...

Regardless, in Tallahassee I  with a few members of the BTC masters team and a number of cockroaches. After previewing the course and a rather uneventful night (although featuring a showing of Kung Pow, Enter the Fist and some dis-concerning noises from underneath the floorboards), it was race day. 

Everyone knew the forecast going in (high near 80 F with a relative humidity upwards of 75%), but those types of conditions are difficult preparation with 10 days 'til winter officially begins in the northern hemisphere. Spectating the men's masters race, I saw one Club Northwest athlete stop, squat for a few seconds, stop, then start running again around the 8k mark. And an M85 athlete still on the course...from two races previous.

Anyway, I won't dwell excessively on my experience of the men's open race. It was my worst race performance in about a decade...I haven't raced that poorly since either my first collegiate 8k (30+ minutes) or first conference track race. The Achilles didn't handle the grassy surface well, and my cramping problem returned around 4k into the race again, similar to at Eastbay. The atmosphere was more that of a poorly paced marathon than a 10 000 meters: race the first half, survive the second half. For me, the second half of the race was essentially a march to the finishing line...as evidenced by the 17:08/19:04 split. Surprisingly, I didn't have the biggest blow up in the open 10k: the person who finished immediately behind me split 16:56/19:22. Needless to say, it was ugly for a lot of people (it had been a long time since I've seen people walking during a cross country race); or, as a member of the BTC masters team told me, "there were a lot of Cooper Teares out there today."

The rest of that Saturday was fairly uneventful (except for the after party...a masters runner had to be carried to an car, I'm assuming after trying to keep up with the college kids at the bar). On Sunday I bid adieu to my fellow housemates at Hotel Roach and got a run in at the J.R. Alford Greenway just outside town, which possessed a fine set of dirt and grass trails, then hit the road back to Jacksonville to fly home.

In hindsight, I made the trip off little fitness with only about six weeks of running after almost three months of cross training, so I couldn't have expected much. And, to be honest, recovery was going so poorly even less than two months ago that it felt racing was far off in the unforeseeable future. So, really, just being able to get out for two races this fall was more than I could have possibly expected a couple of months ago. Hopefully, I can cajole the recovery to continue apace...