For me, sleeping in means 5:12 a.m. My alarm is set for 5:10 a.m., and when I get lucky, I get to sleep for a few extra minutes before my mom comes and drags me out of the bed. Then, without a single dab of makeup on, I grab my water bottle and my stopwatch and head out the door.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the sport of cross country, practices are bright and early! It’s actually comical to the passersby who see about 20 or 30 kids piled up at the track at 5:30 in the morning just to run. I don’t know why I keep doing it but I got, shall we say, “hooked” on it in the seventh grade. In those days, we had about four members on the whole team. Now, there are about 25 of us.

Every year, the same thing happens on the first day of practice. There’s a ton of people out ready to run who don’t have a clue what they are getting themselves into. Then, after the first practice, half of them quit! The ones who stick around for more than a week are usually the ones who are going to be the dedicated runners.

I still remember my first practice ever. I got up and did my makeup and fixed my hair, and headed out the door to go run. That was the first and last time I ever spent more than 20 seconds in front of a mirror before a practice.

It can get kind of scary running down roads in complete darkness through neighborhoods and streets. But your motivation is to get finished so you can dash home and look halfway decent for school. Usually we are done around 6:30, but on good days we get done by 6:20. You would be amazed how much those extra 10 minutes mean to a crazy morning when you have to be at school at 7:30 to redo a quiz.

Our meets are mostly on Saturdays, but occasionally there will be a Friday one, in which case we get to miss an entire day of school to go run. But we still have to do all the makeup work that comes along with it, so I’m not sure if it evens out.

You have to be a dedicated and responsible individual to balance this sport in your life. I’m sure I speak for more than myself when I say cross-country is the hardest sport there is.