Brianna Ganzon
Though most Mt. Carmel students haven’t spent long hours running during the summer, the same can’t be said for the members of the MC Cross Country Varsity team, who have been training since the start of summer for this upcoming season.
“We’ve been doing lots of miles, lots of different types of hard workouts like hill work, and some days we pick up the speed on our runs and go faster,” said senior Derek Morton. “We especially do long runs and we run for a really long time and just get our endurance up.”
Morton feels this summer has prepared the Cross Country team well.
“I think I’ve improved the most on my overall strength as a runner and I think our team has a lot of depth. We have a lot of good people,” Morton said.
Junior Mae Lee agrees that the team has shown great improvement since last season.
“A lot of the girls have banded together and worked really hard for this upcoming season because we know we have a lot of depth on the team that we didn’t have last year,” Lee said. “Over the summer we’ve been doing a lot of things mentally and as a team to prepare. We’ve done a lot of team bonding and had a lot of inspiring talks to help us [to] keep working hard.”
Lee also notes that unity plays a big role on the team.
“I think that this year the team has a lot more unity than it has last year,” Lee said. “I think we realized that as a team it’s our responsibility to push each other.”
Cross Country’s first meet is on September 7th at Kit Carson Park in Escondido. Regarding the meet, Lee is excited and is interested to see the results of summer training.
“It’ll be interesting to see where everybody’s at,” Lee said. “Right now it looks like our team has a lot of people [who are] at the same speed so it could go either way. I’m excited to see if our summer training has paid off.”
Morton is eager for the season to start, and feels that the team will be able to reach CIFs once again.
“I feel really excited,” Morton said. “I think we’re gonna do pretty good and we have a chance of repeating as CIF champions.”
