Pre-Dawn Contemplations

 I slept really, really well these past few nights after Biden secured the win against the Orange Man (yes folks, he won... deal with it). However, perhaps too much sleep and peace of mind woke me up early this morning. It didn't take long to come to a logical conclusion to take advantage of the early hours and go for a run. Glad I did. 

As my headlamp lit the way, I pondered the Maine Principal Association's recent decision to cancel the high school cross country championships. In short, the right call without question. During a meet last weekend where runners were required to race with masks, well... quite frankly it was a shit show. Some runners allegedly passed out, other runners were pulling their masks down either blatantly or when they thought nobody was looking, and others were playing by the rules and sucking it up and accepting a slower time. It was an experiment that definitely provided a lot of interesting insight to help make any decisions moving forward. 

Throw into the mix that Corona cases are starting to substantially rise, if not blow up, in most of Maine. The risk with that is obvious, but on top of that, a few teams wouldn't have been able to compete because of current shut downs, a few others would have incomplete teams due to quarantines, and a good handful had their seasons interrupted earlier in the year with shutdowns and weren't in top shape unlike some of the other teams. Our girls team had an outside chance of qualifying for states but that was thrown out the window when we were hit with quarantines in our district. I haven't heard of those aspects being taken into serious consideration and I can only hope that they were.

Back to the final meet of the season last Saturday... at that time, states had not yet been cancelled. I had asked a few coaches of other schools if they thought the championship should still go on. Naturally, responses varied... I'll just leave it at that. It underscored my belief that logic always rules over emotion when trying to assess these types of situations. However, like I said in my last post, I was very thankful that we at least had a partial season, even if it was a strange one. We had fun. We learned. Runners improved. It was a big success on many meaningful fronts. And as the season has ended, in a way I begin my own. As my injuries improve, so does my motivation. This morning was testament to that. I am starting to feel like a runner again.