Edison Cross Country

I miss Edison to be honest, it was a fun two years at the school where I met a lot of friends which I have still kept in touch with in high school. I remember how nervous I was on the first day of school, sticking next to Isandro, Omeed and my other friend Daniel Giger, during the opening assembly. I was bummed that middle schools didn’t have soccer teams, so I joined the cross country team with my friends to get to know a lot of the kids there, and because I thought I was a fast kid. There I realized just how much stamina I had.

                Compared to other schools, I’m pretty sure Edison had one of the toughest cross country programs, we would run about 2 miles around the neighborhood every day after school, and on good days once in a while we would go on ice cream runs. We would have to be careful though because there had been recent kidnappings of middle school students and one group of Edison runners had reported a car following them during practice.

                The meets were what we worked up to, and they were fun. Dozens of schools putting up there 7 best runners, to see which team and individual would be the best. It was exciting because you felt that you mattered since every person you passed would mean an extra point for your team. Right before the race started you could sense how nervous everyone was, stretching, constantly moving and having unnecessary nervous laughter, was what kept everyone together. Everything built up to the announcer shouting through a speaker phone, to a crowd of runners in their starting positions, “On your marks” followed by a gunshot. After the gunshot all hell would break loose, with runners jostling for position, and it could be dangerous sometimes when there was a narrow entrance, because all the runners would get crammed and when every runner has spikes it can get dangerous, especially if you fall. I remember one race when Isandro was spiked and bleeding from the kick of the person in front of him. Isandro and I would always stick next to each other and finish right after each other, I believe by the end of 7^th grade we had beat each other an equal amount of times, but by the end of 7^th grade my PR was 11:30 compared to his 11:33. Just saying.

                All in all Cross Country was one of the highlights of middle school for me, and I still regret missing running in state for a soccer game. Believe it or not, I was not actually that enthusiastic about going to Uni the next year and if you were to ask me what Uni was at the beginning of 7^th grade I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. I was barely persuaded to go and it was only because Omeed and Isandro were going too. I say this because I was super pumped for 8^th grade cross country in Edison because we would have a varsity team that would have gotten all times under 11:30 by the end of the year, and having a solid team like that would definitely guaranteed us a spot for being one of the top 3 teams in the state.

Although going to Uni meant leaving that dream aside, I knew it was better in the long run, and unfortunately subbie year Doug didn’t let me do Cross Country along with club soccer and that was the end of the line for me and Cross Country.

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