Runners to your mark, get set, go. The gun goes off, and the race is on. Over a 150 girls are running alongside each other competing for a medal. Each girl absolutely exhausted by the last stretch pulls out her superhuman ability and sprints the last two-hundred meters.

“What goes through my mind while I am racing is to never give up, pass the girl a head of me and sprint through the finish line,” Hanna Noble, sophomore, said

The runners get home and straight to the ice bath they go. They wake up the next morning as stiff as a stick. Sore, they slowly walk to their classes. Their first class of the day is practice. They get to practice and run a minimum of two miles, and sometimes the coach will throw in some stairs. Sore muscles is their everyday thing. The runners go through the week running two or more miles every day.

Finally, it’s Friday. Friday is their rest day, so they can rest for the meet the next morning. Instead of sleeping in on their Saturdays, they get up early and head to school to load the bus for yet another cross country meet, and the process starts all over again. The cross country team competes against schools twice their size.

“It is hard to run against bigger schools because they usually have more athletic runners and its harder to medal with so many girls running,” Hopelin Hood, freshman, said.

The runners have to have the mental ability to push themselves past their limits. The runners run on all kinds of terrains. They run up steep hills and across pastures.

The cross country team devotes their time and energy to try and be the best they can be. They spend extra time after practice to run and get into better shape for the upcoming cross country meets.

“I do cross country because I always have been doing it and it is my last year racing and I want to make the most out of it,” Keely Green, senior, said.