Cedarville University Yellow Jackets

Nov. 22, 2019

I’m not sure if I have mentioned this or not in the past, but I am an English major. Right now, I’m in the midst of composing a fairly lengthy studying on a play called The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill. The playwright is generally considered one of the most renown American writers in the modern period, right alongside writers like Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Most literary critics consider the play to be a tragedy. I won’t get into the details of the ending partly because you probably don’t care but more importantly it would detract from my analogy. However, others, including O’Neill himself, classify the play as a comedy. Generally, a helpful way to think about the difference between tragedy and comedy in drama is a tragedy ends sad and a comedy ends happy. For example, in Shakespeare’s tragedies, most of the characters end up dead, and in his comedies, most of the characters end up married to a fitting partner (apparently that was the equivalent to happiness for The Bard). The full title of The Hairy Ape, which critics rarely use, is The Hairy Ape: a comedy of ancient and modern life. The point is this: the play has garnered strangely mixed reviews about whether or not the end is happy or despairing (good ole’ literary modernism).

I think what’s most interesting about the mixed reviews on the plays endings is that whatever the reader concludes about the how to classify the play says a lot not just about how they interpret the play, but what they believe happiness and despair actually are. In other words, the readers’ interpretation may largely reflect what their “good” is. I won’t spoil the plays’ ending, but suffice to say, if you read the end without considering the other seven acts, the play would definitely feel like a tragedy. I’m not sure where I stand yet on the plays’ classification, but I know that if you consider the play a comedy, it is because you’re taking a lot of interpretative weight from the rest of the play. That is, you are relying on the entire scope or the whole trajectory of the story to justify your stance.

If you’ve managed to stay with me so far, good job and I promise I won’t talk about literature anymore. If you read last week’s blog, you heard from Ford about regionals and how that wasn’t exactly the performance nor experience that the team was hoping to have. As the season concludes, I have been asking myself the question: was this season a comedy or a tragedy? When you look at the running and the times in isolation, it could be really easy to see the season as a tragedy. I for one only ran two races, one of which was on an injured calf and demanded a lot more limping than one should do in an 8K and the other was just bad without a good excuse for being bad. After a hard summer of training (actually, if you zoom out enough, you can say a hard many years of training), it is obviously disappointing in many ways for the season to pan out like that. I think that some of my teammates, even if their story wasn’t the same, may be looking back on the season of running and be considering it a tragedy.

However, the more I thought about the season, the more it became a comedy in my mind. I loved the opportunity to train hard this summer, and living in the town of Cedarville, I got to train with Luke Bredeson, Andrew Testas and many others as they came into town for long-runs or workouts; I got to be a captain which, I hope, was a way I could serve the team well not to mention a ton of fun time spent with the other captains; we got to plan an exciting camping trip; I got another year of Bible studies and other forms of spiritual growth that being on the team allows; and on and on. I could go on listing specifics but the point is this: when I look at the trajectory of the entire season, when I keep the entire scope of the whole narrative in mind, the season much more readily takes form into a comedy. Moreover, when I look back at my four other seasons of training, almost all of which where injury riddled, I don’t look back at those as tragic. Sure, from a strictly athletic perspective, they were disastrous, but life is a whole lot more than that, and for that reason, I don’t have to dwell in the tragedy that has been my running career in many senses.

I don’t want to downplay the value that the team places on performing well. For starters, when you spend the hours upon hours we do on training, bending our schedules, diets, sleep habits, and almost every other area of our lives to fit the shape of our training, you want to run well. You want your season to be a comedy in a strictly athletic sense. However, I know this sport and our team is a lot more than times and trophies. I don’t know where every single person on the team is at with their seasons and how they are classifying 2019 cross country, tragedy or comedy, but I know that some great things have happened this year, and there are sure a lot of things to find comedic.


Nov. 12, 2019

(Editor's Note: Senior Ford McElroy, a math major from Whipple, Ohio, is filling in this week for Ryan Vojtisek)
 

Hey everyone, Ford McElroy here. I’m the guest blogger for this week. For those who don’t know, I’m a senior math major. This was my first time being in the varsity squad for the NCAA II Midwest Regional, as well as my fourth and (sadly) final season on the cross country team. I’ll get into more reflection later though.

So Regionals. First, I want to thank everyone who came out to watch as well as those who were supporting from home. Even though only seven get to run in the race, the support of the alternates, teammates, parents and friends who traveled for hours to come watch or sent encouraging text messages or whatever it may be, makes an undeniable positive difference. You guys are great.

Unlike most sports, what happens in the regular season - for better or for worse - has little effect on the post-season. Instead, it seems as if the entire season hangs in the balance when we toe the line at Regionals, this year at the Angel Mounds course in Evansville, Indiana. In this case, our regular season had been overall disappointing. Despite making Nationals last year, having several returners and promising freshmen, it seemed that week after week little things were going wrong and we weren’t running up to our potential. Sure, each week saw some individuals do well, but by and large it seemed that greater team success was escaping us.

For that reason, Regionals stood as one final chance for everything to come to fruition. A chance to beat some teams that had escaped us all year. A chance for everyone to have a good day together. Maybe even a chance to make it to Nationals again. We went into the meet with a cautious hope. Instead, Regionals reflected the same pattern as the rest of the season. Sure, we had some people do well (Isaiah Kelly, one of our freshmen, ran 33:58 as a freshman in his first 10K ever), but overall team success escaped us yet again. It was a rough day physically and emotionally. (It was also pretty muddy at points, which was fun and difficult at the same time.)

Personally, my race was pretty good too (after running the 10K in track every year, I finally got to run one in cross country), but like everything before, I wonder what my season could have been. After missing two races for a test for grad school and then appendicitis, and then effectively losing two more to rough days (one of which was my first race back from my appendectomy), I felt like Regionals was just finally getting back on track, not a large leap forward in performance as I was hoping for.

Alright, enough bad news. While the race results of this season left much to be wanted, we still have many blessings to count. (Side note: I’ve been talking as if the season is over and after Regionals it certainly feels like that for a lot of us, but we will still be taking a group down to the National Christian College meet for one last race. This is always a strange race mentally as it feels anticlimactic, but it is a race nonetheless. One last chance for seven to toe the line.) After four years on the team, every season has been full of comradery, this one included, perhaps even to the greatest extent. I may be slightly biased as a senior, hence having the most time to get to know my teammates, but still, I love the guys and all the shared experiences we’ve had (runs, bus rides, runs, hotels, runs, Bible studies, runs, races, runs…you get the idea) and I’m confident everyone would say the same.

To reflect some (as promised earlier), this team has meant far more to me than any “game” we play together could ever mean on its own. I remember coming in as a freshman with our enormous, team-doubling class with great expectations for the time we would have together, and I can confidently say that looking back, my experience was even better than I could have imagined.


Nov. 6, 2019

The cold weather has settled over Cedarville as what we most commonly consider fall slips away in the wisps of baby flurries and still red leaves. It’s actually a lovely time of year for a runner - tights and long sleeves are cozy as we slide them on for the first time this year. Additionally, it isn’t nearly cold enough where we have to consider, as we will soon, whether to brave the weather or surrender to the monotony of the dreadmill.

On the other hand, it is a bit of a strange time on the team. The season is very much happening still, however, because Cedarville is such a large team, the majority of us are, personally and individually, done with our seasons. There are 29 guys on our roster. Last week was our G-MAC meet in which those who were running whittled down to 16. This week is the regional meet where we will run seven of our guys, though 10 will travel. The 19 guys who are not running regionals will all do something a bit different with their training. Some will take “time off” or days with no running. Usually we take anywhere from five days to two weeks off.

Those who struggled with injuries or were fending off aches that would likely turn to injuries usually take more time off. Meanwhile, for our ten fast friends, this is sometimes one of the most challenging parts of the season. At this point, the season often feels like it has stayed past its welcome, which comes into tension with it being the most important part of the year for cross country. Those who have not been meeting goal times throughout the year will often have grown weary, and those who have hit those goals have the physical challenge of maintaining their condition. This is the transitional time from regular season to championship season where a lot of the team is doing different things with their training, and even more members are in different head spaces of where they want the next month or two to bring them. While some are looking for the fastest race of their life, others are soaking in the rest and others are anxiously trying to get healthy for track (that’s me).

For me personally, this has felt like one of the strangest transitional times I’ve experienced in my college career. We deal with this transitional period a few times a year (heading into cross country championship season, indoor track and outdoor track), and this is my fourth year here. We seem to have the strongest contrast between different members of the team that we’ve had before. Some members are exhausted and questioning if they want to keep running at all. I have certainly had to ask myself that question, this being my fourth year and only having had two fully healthy seasons (freshman year cross country and indoor track). Josiah had surgery and as he is rehabbing, isn’t sure that the surgery was at all effective. Of course, that’s a hard spot to be in with only one semester of his undergraduate left. On the other hand, a lot of our team has run faster than ever before and has serious plans about doing that for another month and a half through nationals. Andrew Sholl is a great example - as hard as he has worked every year, he is running his best and his excitement and expectations for the teams’ work ethic have reflected that.

The captains, myself being one of them, have had many conversations about how we can serve the team in a way that continues to motivate them no matter what position they’re in right now. That’s obviously tough to do when people are in such varying positions. Though those conversations are tiresome and often challenging, sometimes leading to butting heads or brisling disagreements that we must work through lovingly and intelligently, or at least try to. However, the difficulties have reminded me of the beauty of being on a big, diverse team. Despite the separation in our situations, we do a great job, most of the time, at working toward trying to understand one another’s positions and encouraging one another no matter the difference in our positions.

I don’t want to make any theological leaps, but I can’t help but think that the team reminds me of how Paul calls the church to function in the Bible. In I Corinthians 12, he compares the church to a physical body in which all the parts rely on one another to be complete, to function properly. Though each part of the body plays a different role with varying skills, talents, perspectives, vocabulary and experiences to bring to the others, each is equally reliant on each other. Though we are not the church and don’t perform the functions of a church, it is a nice comparison to the way we, as Christian runners on a team, try to relate to one another.

With that, on we march, as one body, to regionals!


Oct. 29, 2019

Saturday, October 26th was a crisp 60 degrees with a bit of a breeze that blew the changing leaves off the trees onto the plush, dewy grass, wet form the prior evenings’ gentle rain. It was perfect running weather for the Great Midwest Athletic Conference Championship race.

To give you a brief background on the G-MAC: the conference formed in 2001 and became an active NCAA Division II league in 2013-2014 with nine teams: Alderson Broaddus, Cedarville, Central State, Davis & Elkins, Kentucky Wesleyan, Ohio Valley, Trevecca, Salem International and Ursuline. At that time, Cedarville was largely the dominant team within the conference. As a team, we had what, admittedly, was a bit of an arrogant saying about the G-MAC during those years; we called it the “G-Smack”. Cedarville won the “G-Smack” in cross country the first six years of the conference’s existence. I arrived at Cedarville in 2016 which was the sixth year we had won the conference. Then, the conference grew. By my senior year, 2019, the G-MAC had added Findlay, Hillsdale, Lake Erie, Ohio Dominican, Tiffin and Walsh. Davis & Elkins, Central State and Salem left as the conference grew, so the conference is now 13 members. Needless to say, G-MAC has gotten significantly stronger. 2017 ended the “G- Smack”, and Cedarville has aimed to take back the title ever since.

Every year, we go into the year with the goal of winning the conference, and this year was no different. This year may have been one of the most competitive years for the G-MAC in cross country, so that was no small goal.

Overall, our race was marked with some ups and downs. Andrew Sholl led the team running a fantastic personal record of 24:55, and Alex Weber followed not too far behind with another strong race running just one second above 25 minutes. They were 8th and 10th place overall, and both of whom earned a spot on the All-G-MAC Second Team. That is the sort of thing one spends four years, countless hours, incredible miles, to earn.

The next six finishers were Caleb Pendleton (22nd with 25:29), Russel Schultz (25th with 25:41), Trent Classen (26th with 25:42), Isaiah Kelly (30th with 25:56), Ford McElroy (32nd with 26:06) and Avery Traffie (33rd with 26:04).

The success and satisfaction of those runners varied per race. Some ran personal records yet were hoping to place better within the race; others were happy to gut out one last personal record. Overall, I think the team executed their race extremely well. The field got out relatively fast, because the course bottlenecked quickly. Cedarville stuck ourselves in there and opened the first two miles in a position to win and running in tight packs. After that, the race started to spread out and so did our guys.

Overall, Cedarville took fourth place. It is a tough situation to have some great performances and have so many guys improve and come so far from our goal. Positively, though, the conference was very strong this year. Additionally, I think looking at the team as a collective whole, if we were to add up the average of the team’s performance, this would have been our best performance of the year. Now it will remain up to each individual to assess whether or not they left everything they had in them on the course. For the 10 guys who will continue to train for regionals, those who gave everything they had will prepare to do it again, hoping that it won’t be the last time. Those who held back or didn’t come fully ready to give everything will reassess and ask themselves how they can leave it all out there next meet. Ultimately, conference is a lot about pride and the potential confidence boost a victory can provide. Because we will face all these teams head-to-head in regionals, we have another opportunity to win when it matters more.


Oct. 22, 2019

This past week at Cedarville, we were on our fall break, so there were no classes on Thursday and Friday. Also, we had a week off from racing. Fall break is one of those awkward breaks that are long enough to either get some work done or take a breathe but not long enough for everyone to go home. A good amount of campus empties out, but a lot of things like the dining hall stay open.

Personally, I worked on graduate school applications and got some miscellaneous work done around my apartment. A group of the team took a camping trip to North Carolina. Some of those who live close by went home and spent time with families, many of them bringing along a friend or two from the team to relax and hang out on the long weekend. Hopefully, though, everyone heads into Monday rested.

This week we have a hard 2 x 2-mile workout on the course on Monday. Most the rest of our days are easy days and Wednesday we’ll do some long strides. The focus, though, is preparing for our G-MAC meet. This meet is important, especially because of the position we’re in as a team. We were certainly hoping to be running better than we have been. We have struggled to get all our guys, or even five of them, running well at the same meet, and it has meant not being in the position we hoped for. However, almost every meet, we have had a different top runner, so if we can get some more of the team to click on the same day, we can certainly still meet our goals.

Because our conference has a lot of teams in our regional, it could prove to be a critical meet. There are two ways to qualify as a team for the national meet. First, at most ideal, finish within the top three teams at the region meet. If you fail to do so, the second means of qualification remains. There are 10 at-large selections in the nation. Those at-large bids ensure that conferences with many fast teams still can qualify. Because the Midwest Region has been one of the fastest overall regions, usually, a couple or a few teams in our region receive at-large selections. The at-large selections are made through a long, arduous process by an NCAA committee. Think of it sort of like the AP rankings for college football - teams are ranked against one another based on a specified list of criteria. The most important of these criteria is head-to-head competition, meaning if Cedarville does not qualify within the top three teams, then we will need to rank high within our region and to have beaten teams outside our regional.

There is a certain feeling to the conference meet. It indices a comradery and positive, team pride that can be really encouraging. It can be just the type of race a team needs to snap into the spot they need to be.


Oct. 15, 2019

(Editor's Note: Avery Traffie, a senior from New Ipswich, New Hampshire, fills in this week as a Guest Blogger)
 

Hello everyone! I’m Avery Traffie. I have the opportunity to contribute to the BLOG as a guest this week. As an introduction, I’m a senior mechanical engineering major and this is my fourth year on the cross country team.

This past week ten members of the team traveled to Charlotte, North Carolina for the Queens Challenge while the rest ran at the Wilmington Classic. I had the privilege of traveling to North Carolina. We usually get one meet where we travel for a weekend besides championships. Unfortunately, with our large team, not all of us can travel for those races. I hope I can provide some insight into traveling with the team and how our race went last Friday.

We left at 7:00 a.m. on Thursday morning. Well, we were supposed to. We were at least 15 minutes later than that. Leaving on schedule isn’t common for us. The drive ahead of us was at least seven hours. This gives us time to do homework, talk, or just relax. In my case, it meant catching up on sleep. When we stopped for lunch, Coach Orchard swung into a parking space and commented on his precise parking. He was confused when the rest of us started laughing. His “precise” parking was taking up most of two spaces. This continued to be a theme with the rest of our stops.

We ended up finding some heavy traffic and the trip took almost nine hours. We stopped first at the course we would be racing on the next day. This provided an opportunity to see what the course would look like, develop a race strategy, and, especially, stretch our legs. Nothing tightens up the muscles quite like sitting in a cramped van for many hours. The course turned out to be three laps and completely flat. The surface was also all gravel. It looked like it could be very fast.

With a short shakeout run finished, we headed back to the hotel to shower, get dinner, and prepare for the race. With some time in the evening, we were able to catch up on homework and watch football before getting some very necessary sleep.

The race was in the afternoon so we were able to sleep in. We left the hotel and got lunch. The extra time gave us an opportunity to drive around the city of Charlotte before we headed to the course.

After enjoying the morning, the atmosphere changed as we focused on the race. I like to listen to music and focus on my race plan. Today, that plan was to run strong in the tough middle miles. The weather was warm and clear. A good day for a race. We warmed up and prayed together before finding our way to the start line. The race had over 500 participants packed on the line. Before I was really ready for it (it always seems to feel that way) the starting gun was fired.

My race started with fighting for position in the huge crowd. The gravel surface also produced an incredible amount of dust. My mouth was dry almost immediately. My first mile was very slow. I couldn’t move past the people ahead of me on the relatively narrow path. I stuck to my race plan and as we headed into the second lap I pushed for position. By the start of the third lap the pain was setting in but I was passing people and kept pushing to get to the next pack.

The dust was so thick by now that I couldn’t see the finish until it was only a short sprint away. I finished in 26:23 for my best race of the season. It felt good to finally run a strong race for the full distance.

At the finish everybody’s teeth were gray with dust and our lungs were burning from breathing it in. The common theme was getting stuck in the huge crowd and struggling with the dust. Alex Weber overcame the conditions and ran an incredible race finishing in 25:01. Andrew Sholl (25:31), Caleb Pendleton (25:32), Russell Schultz (25:38), and I rounded out the scoring five for the team. I was happy to score for the first time this season but the big gap between Russell and I is what we have been trying to close this year as we look towards trying to qualify for nationals. We left the meet knowing we still have some work to do to get where we want to be as a team.

We always pray as a team at the finish line and invite our competitors to join us. It’s a great opportunity to share Christ with others. It is also often when I get to reflect on the race we just ran. This weekend I was thankful for the incredible gift our sport is. God gave us the health, the ability, and opportunity to compete. Just being able to run, to spend time with teammates, and to travel like we do is an incredible blessing.

Also, at dinner, Coach finally parked the van perfectly in one space. I’m sure everyone in the parking lot was confused as to why our team was cheering as we got out of the van.


Oct. 8, 2019

Hello! Thanks for tuning in; the past week, the team did not have a meet, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to talk a little bit about what the life of a Cedarville cross country runner looks like outside of meets and practice. For any who don’t know, Cedarville is a “Christian” institution. In some cases, that label means little to nothing, but Cedarville takes that title seriously. Please don’t think that just means Cedarites are all “holier than thou,” as the saying goes. The idea that a Christian would take their title of “Christ-follower” seriously just means that follower carries a sense of holy superiority would be to grossly convolute what the Bible says about “religion”.

On the contrary, Jesus seems to have told Christians they ought to celebrate the good deeds of “non-religious” people more than the correct acts of the people we might call Christians (Luke 15:25-32). That is all to say, Cedarville tries to be less interested in religious piety and more concerned with figuring out how the Bible tells its readers that people ought to live. A process that all people are told to do, but let’s be honest, a process that demands hard work, intentionality, persistence and, most importantly, the Holy Spirit.

The answer to the question, how does a Cedarville cross country runner spend his time outside of training, would ideally be: working hard on intentionally and persistently on figuring out how the Bible tells its readers that people ought to live. One of the most important parts of that process for our team is a weekly Bible study. Once a week, we meet to discuss various aspects of the Bible in an attempt to maintain that diligence and hard work necessary for the Christian life.

Usually, it looks like one of the six captains leading the group in a discussion about a Biblical principle. We have been using Athlete in Action’s (AIA) sports discipleship guide as a framework for those meanings. AIA is a local sports ministry that reaches out to athletes on a global scale. That ranges from local high school athletes to NBA and Olympic athletes. This guide helps us see how sports can be a platform for loving others as an attempt to reveal the gospel.

Some weeks we just spend time worshiping through song or praying for local and national issues we believe need prayer and attention (that’s a lot of them, by the way). Sometimes we give other teammates the opportunity to share what God’s been teaching them or to share a testimony - an excellent way to encourage one another about the way Christ practically works to change our life.

Additionally, each captain meets for a meal with a group of runners on the team. There, we talk about anything from the stress of our recent or upcoming exams to similar Christian stuff I mentioned above. This is a great opportunity for us to take some time to relax together. Also, over the school year, the group really grows in closeness, becoming more familiar and comfortable with one another, which is something we find to be an important part of spurring each other on in that thing I mentioned earlier about trying to learn and practice living the way the Bible tells us to.

You could say that as a team, we try to commit to creating times and spaces to promote our growth in Christ, or, to grow closer in our relationship with Jesus by practicing and learning His Word. That doesn’t always mean we are successful at that; on the contrary, that is why we place regular parameters to encourage and help one another maintain that commitment.

Outside of that, we try to find time for other fun activities. We go to the movies; we eat meals together; we play other people’s sports; etc. But, of course, we spend a great deal of our time STUDYING. I guess that’s a pretty big part of the reason we’re here, after all, and studying is something we are doing a lot of this weekend. Though we had last week off from meets, this week is a busy one. Ten of our guys are leaving on Thursday for the Queens Challenge in Charlotte, North Carolina. The rest of those who are healthy are leaving Friday afternoon to run at the Wilmington (OH) Classic. That means we’re trying to get ahead on homework and be prepared for strong races there. Evidently, that makes things quite busy. So, with that, I’m off to meet the team for practice which I will follow up with an evening of studying!


Sept. 30, 2019

It has been a while since I shared a blog. I took last week off because we didn’t race last week, so I thought I’d cover the time in this week’s blog. That and I was drowning in busyness. That is one thing I love about the cross country season - generally our meets are every other week, regularly giving us a week away from racing. Running-wise, we can either spend that time getting in some extra workouts with the added available days for recovery. It can also be a chance to spread those workouts out more and get extra rest. Races take a toll on the body, so sometimes we come out of the weekend needing more rest than workouts. Between the physical exertion demanded, the race itself demands and the travel time, which often brings late nights and early mornings, competing requires taking a beating.

The team has been hitting workouts hard - it is that time of the year. Lots of long repeated intervals at high-intensity pace. Unfortunately, we’ve also been waiting for the weather to break, so much of those workouts are in the heat. And that heat certainly wasn’t coming down for this past weekend’s meet when Cedarville hosted the annual All-Ohio Championships.

All-Ohio is the first race we run with a robust and challenging field of competition. We typically consider it our first true test of our ability to perform. This year, that test would occur under intense conditions: 90-degrees and high humidity. Those conditions make preparing to run an 8K no easy task, for runners and otherwise. Cedarville’s absolutely amazing training staff had hundreds, if not thousands, of gallons of ice and water in bags, coolers, water dispensers and cold tubs ready for the inevitable externalities of hundreds of athletes running in such heat: heat exhaustion, strokes, delirium, dehydration, etc. The preparation and results of such a race are evidence of how grueling our sport often is.

Running is tough in a lot of ways. The competition, certainly, is difficult, but other struggles also plague runners. One of those is injury. Running has one of the highest injury rates of any sport. Often, those injuries are chronic, and worst of all, a great deal of them are difficult to pinpoint or understand. While this does happen in other sports - fortunately, we don’t usually have to deal with things like ACL tears or concussions - the frequency and demands of running injuries are nearly unparalleled. I can attest to that first-hand. I have been injured on and off since March of my freshman year; I am a senior now. Almost the entire time has been a strange case of patella tendonitis that only healed at the cost of surgery. This past summer, though, I had nearly entirely finished my recovery from that surgery and was running close to the same amount and quality as before my injury. That was until a few weeks ago. Now, I am dealing with a mysterious calf injury which looks and sounds like a strain but doesn’t smell or taste like one. After two years of working on fixing and healing my knee and another half a year to fully recover from that fixing, I was soon thereafter struck with a new injury. This is just one of many similar stories about injured runners who spend almost their entire collegiate career working to fix injuries that ultimately often never go away.

Another pain of running is when things just don’t seem to click. Sometimes, runners can be hitting all their workout times, eating all the right foods, sleeping enough, etc. and for some unknown reason, fail to produce the correlating times in their races. This seemed to be the case for the team on Saturday. Despite our best efforts, we fell short of our goals for the race. We hoped to beat some conference teams and win the race among other Division II teams. We came up fourth among DII and failed to place many of our runners where we know they can among the field.

These are running pains. As much as they are running pains, though, they are also growing pains. They fester a passion, a desire and sometimes an anger that is often necessary to continue to drive us through the season toward our goals. Ultimately, we think we are far from where we can be. That means we spend time assessing what we did well, first off. For starters, we had some good races. Andrew Sholl ran what Kevin described as “the race of his life,” and it is true. Despite the time seemingly not reflecting that, because of the heat, the race was a fantastic effort. We improved our ability to run together as a pack, and I believe that kept us in the race as much as we were in it. Our performance, too, will demand some reflection. That will be the responsibility of each athlete to do individually.

Writing this blog on Sunday, Sept. 29, at the end of the week, has given me chance to reflect on our running pains. I am reminded how much we learn from our pains, and that they hold a value in that alone. I am reminded, also, that despite not performing as we hoped or despite dealing with yet another injury or despite the great heat all the runners endured Saturday, we are responsible to thank and bring glory to God for our abilities, opportunities and even our performances. That is a lesson worth more than a victory.

So, now that we learned our lesson, let’s keep striving for that victory.


Sept. 17, 2019

Hello readers. I hope you all had a peaceful weekend, maybe had a chance to relax or get caught up on some things. The cross country team, however, did not have that opportunity.

In college, now is about the time school starts. That is to say: after a few weeks of friendly workloads, mid-semester schedules rear their heads around and reminds us how ugly they can be. For a lot of us, the next two weeks host our first round of exams. Homework comes in at max capacity, its excess weight squeezing out our free time. Returning students say, “oh yeah, we’re back to it” while freshmen gawk, “what did I get myself into?”. I’m exaggerating, of course, but you hopefully get the point - we’re getting busy.

Meanwhile, workouts are sort of at their peak. From here on, they don’t get any easier. Days before and after are spent preparing from all angles to ensure optimal readiness and recovery. All the while continually cycling through thoughts of this past weekend zip through our mind.

This past Saturday Cedarville hosted our annual Friendship Invitational. It is a relatively small meet, but it’s always exciting getting out on the home course. We’ll run one more time there at the All- Ohio, a meet where we really have to put ourselves out there and see what we’re made of. Friendship is a great primer for that.

So, two and a half hours before the meet, we meet in a campus dorm’s lounge. The captain’s give an encouraging speech on honoring our home course with the respect of a hard-fought race. We pray that hosting will allow us to bless and share Christ-likeness with the teams who we are hosting. Then, it’s downhill from there.

Cedarville claimed second, losing only to the NCAA Division I University of Dayton. We had some guys improve times, and some stay close to the same as at Indiana Wesleyan the week prior. Our course is a bit tougher, so that is generally expected. I was unable to race due to a calf injury I’m nursing, so I got the opportunity to see our guys run. It was great to see big packs of yellow-singleted runners flying by near the front of the race - something we hope to continue to see.

Our scoring five were as follows: Caleb Pendleton (26:07), Alex Weber (26:11), Andrew Sholl (26:21), Isaiah Kelly (26:21) and Trevor Cross (26:30). Note, we did not have Ford McElroy, who finished second for our team with a 25:48 last week, because he was off taking his GRE.

After our race, the team works to host six more races for middle and high schoolers. So, that kept us busy most of the day. Sunday brings the rest of church fellowship, recovery runs and then the homework scramble.
 
Now, we’re back to classes and workouts. This week, we have the weekend off of racing which provides an opportunity to catch up, hit some solid workouts and hopefully get some rest. Our next meet is the All-Ohio Championship on our course where we continue to work toward one of our most immediate goals of getting five guys under 26 minutes.


Sept. 9, 2019

Thanks for tuning into the Cedarville’s men’s cross country blog. My name is Ryan Vojtisek, and I have the privilege of writing the blog each week, aside from some sporadic guest blogs. I aim to keep the blog’s readers informed about the condition of the team - be it in training, racing or even our personal and spiritual lives - from week to week. I hope the blogs will weave a narrative from which readers can glean a deeper understanding for what our team does and, more importantly, what drives us to do it.

Firstly, let’s play catch-up. The team arrived on campus about a month ago. We began the season with what we have cleverly termed “camp week,” a week before classes start dedicated to training, getting to know one another and meetings upon meetings. This year, for the first half of camp week, we took it to the woods. Camping in John Bryan was a blast. We cooked our meals atop fires and charcoal grills, slept through rainstorms - that is, were awoken by severe thunderstorms - and ran a lot. That first week is exciting; all us returning athletes have spent summers away from what now feels like home away from all our friends, and the newbies are like puppies in a new house. The air is humming with a fresh start.

After a week of too many meetings, too many morning-runs and not enough sleep, we roll into the school year. New classes are exciting, or dreadful, and everyone is eager to show off their hard-earned summer-shape in workouts. There’s something special about the first few full team workouts of the year - edging out one another to get the extra step, legs still fresh from lack of racing fatigue and plenty of heat to go around. This year, we’ve been starting with a lot or race-paced intervals, practicing holding our hoped-for speed at a shorter distance should help us work into the PR’s we’re all itching for.

After the first week, being back on campus catches up to everyone as we all catch the "Cedarplague". Sickness spreads unstoppably fast and all the workouts and adjusting to a new sleep schedule don’t help. About half of the team lives in one dorm unit, so once one of us gets it (thanks Kevin), we all get it. As we head into our third week back in Cedarville, we’re all nursing or fending off sickness of various kinds. This is one of a runner’s unrelenting struggles.

In the midst of our bouts for good health, our first week of racing finally arrives. On Friday, September 6th we boarded the buses for Indiana Wesleyan University. There is a particular appeal to boarding that bus again. This season, many hours will be spent on that bus - chugging back and forth to races, massaging muscles and preparing minds, recovering legs and nursing race-pains, lamenting and reveling alike. For the seniors, it is a familiar and even exhilarating feeling; for freshmen, it’s novel and even nerve racking.

The course was fairly loopy but also incredibly flat, overall, it made for a pretty fast first course. The weather was wonderful: low 70’s and overcast with a breeze enough to cool but not enough to throw your pace off. Our performance, overall, was very hopeful. Early season rust-busters are the types of races you take the good and run with it and leave the bad on the course, shaking it off as early-season sludge. As Coach Orchard would later put it, we had “some good, some expected, and some areas of struggle.....that's the case with a race with 20 in it”. We had some freshmen really show up; Trevor Cross ran a fantastic opener (1st on our team with 25:47), and we always love those surprise freshman firsts, and Isiah Kelly came up in our top five (5th with 26:22). And the rest of our top five - Alex Weber (25:48), Ford McElroy (25:57) and Caleb Pendleton (26:16) - all brought PR’s for a strong start to the season. Overall, it was an exciting opener.

This week, it’s back to the course for more workouts and back to the infirmary to get healthy. On Saturday, we’ll fight for first on our own course in the Annual Friendship Invitational.


Ryan Vojtisek is a senior from Kenosha, Wisconsin. He is in his fourth year with the Yellow Jackets and is a Dean's List student majoring in English at Cedarville University.