Trimble Racing

Here are some photos from my cross country season at Lees-McRae. We had a great season, finishing second in our conference and fifth in our region.

Our first meet was at Appalachian State University. I was pretty rusty after not running track last semester and my time showed it, but I soon got back in the swing of things and was running faster than ever.

The whole crew at the start of a race in Lenoir, North Carolina.

It was a relatively small meet of about 70 runners. I started out with the lead pack, somewhere I am not used to being in cross country, and hung on for about half the race. After getting dropped, I maintained my position and finished 6th, my best place in a cross country meet ever.

The rest of my team was close behind and we won the meet.

Next we raced at Appalachian Sate again on the exact same course six weeks after the first time we raced their. It was a huge meet with over 220 racers. This time I was ready to race and managed to squeeze myself into the top 100 with a strong last mile and finished 93rd. I ran the 8k course in 26:53 , beating my personal best from the week before by 3 seconds.

Our conference championship was next. It was a brutal course with rutty trails, lots of hills, and some sticky mud pits.

My teammates Critter and Craig Simpkins ran great and finished ahead of me in 4th and 7th. I was close behind in 9th and mt teammate Cody was close behind me in 10th.

Craig kicking my ass.

This monk got our times

It was a close race. Despite having four runners in the top ten, we lost to St. Andrews College by just five points.

Regionals was next. We needed to get 2nd as a team to advance to nationals. We fell short of 2nd but were ranked 7th going into the race and ended up 5th out of 20 teams. Most importantly, we beat St. Andrews by two points. The course alternated between wooded trails with lots of hills and turns to open fields. It was a surreal feeling going from the lonely silence of the woods with no one around me but a few other runners to the roar of the crowds screaming in my face in the open parts of the course.

Critter’s beautiful flowing mohawk.

An interested spectator.

I was teetering on the edge of hitting the wall almost the whole race. The course was rolling hills the whole way and up every hill I wanted to give up. From the gun, I was somewhere in the low twenties and yo-yoed between 20th and 30th until the last mile. Critter started faster than me and soon was almost out of sight. Craig passed and dropped me about half way through and caught Critter. Regionals is a 10k race rather than the normal 8k we ran at every other meet. At the 8k mark, I found myself somewhere around 30th and finally decided to suck it up, accept the pain, and make a move. By this time, most people in the race were starting to crumble and I passed a group of runners ahead of me. With about a half mile to go, I passed Critter and Craig and didn’t look back. In the end, I finished 22nd out of 140 runners.

Carla ran great and finished 6th after winning three national championships in mountain biking two weeks before.

Lees-McRae women won the meet and are on their way to nationals!

All in all, it was definitely my best collegiate running season yet and we had a lot of fun.

I’ve done a lot of brutal races in my life, but there is nothing that quite compares with the pure agony of cross country. I believe this is written on the faces of the athletes in these photos.

FACES OF PAIN

Zoom in on this one, pretty hilarious