Neither rain nor wind nor mud slow Santa Fe High runners
There is something about Mother Nature that tests the will of an athlete.
Football players slogging it out on a football field is considered a testament to testosterone.
A pitcher staring in for the catcher’s signal in a deluge speaks to the mind over matter.
For cross-country runners, the exam is to ignore the raindrops hitting their faces and drenching their uniforms, while mud cakes everything from their thighs to their ankles. And they still click off 6-minute mile splits. The Santa Fe High cross-country team got a taste of that Wednesday afternoon.
Running between Atalaya Elementary School and St. John’s College, the boys and girls trekked through rain, wind and mud for their midweek workout. A trail that runs into the arroyo in front of the college challenged the group to focus on its pace as well as the placement of feet. A couple of runners returned to the Atalaya Trail parking lot with mud stains on their back and legs after taking a tumble.
Some even missed the sign leading back to the parking lot, and they ran a couple extra miles before Santa Fe High assistant Richard Curry chased them down and redirected them. It’s all a process of mind over matter.
“That’s really helpful — the mud and the rain and the rocks,” Demonettes senior Daisy Gephart said. “This weekend, we are going to Cochiti [for the John Grimley Memorial Invitational meet], and it’s sandy and hilly. We are just trying to get ready for meet, but it helps a lot. If you’re not running in the rain, you’re not ready for it. If you’re not running uphill, you’re not ready for it.”
Peter Graham, the longtime cross-country head coach, said run-
ning in inclement weather is an important rite of passage for his team.
“Facing a little adversity is good for them,” Graham said. “To see that they can deal with it, that’s good. They see the weather and they worry about training in it, and I tell them, ‘We’re going to run in it. You need to deal with different situations and you can overcome them.’”
Like the idea that an extra “A” to Santa Fe High’s classification is a scarlet letter when it comes to competing against the largest collection of schools in the state. The Demonettes have demonstrated they are capable of being one of the “big girls” in Class 6A, as an eighth-place finish at last year’s state meet can attest. They return the bulk of that squad, and the experience has made them better, and hungrier.
All the while, they are ignoring the negative vibes that gave permeated the halls since the school moved up to 6A.
“We just push out the negativity and focus more on our running,” sophomore Maya Holder said. “Last year, it made is want to try harder and achieve more, and maybe even finish higher.”
Santa Fe High is slowly building momentum toward that goal. It took third place in its own Capital City Invitational last weekend, with 103 points. The total was just 58 points behind winner Taos, but the Demonettes did something that Graham said hadn’t happened in a while.
“It was a big boost for our girls see they beat Pojoaque, for one thing,” Graham said. “I don’t know how long it has been since we beat Pojoaque, so to beat those teams is a plus and it gives them confidence going forward.”
The past three weeks saw Santa Fe make gains in that department. After a disappointing 20th-place finish at the UNM Invitational, a meet in which the Demonettes were missing several runners, Santa Fe High responded with a seventh at the Joe I. Vigil Open at Alamosa, Colo., then winning Belen’s Adron Gardner invite on Sept. 16.
While senior Daisy Gephart took over the mantle as the No. 1 runner for Sierra Sweeney, who graduated in the spring, the Demonettes’ strength has been in their pack mentality after Gephart. A quintet of runners have more than done their part, whether it’s Maya Holder finishing as the No. 2 runner for the past two meets, Rue Allison overcoming plantar fasciitis and IT band issues to finish in eighth place in Belen, or eighth grader Isabella Quintana finishing in the top five in two meets.
“I think we’re in a good spot for where we are in the season,” Allison said. “We can’t just sit back and relax, we need to keep pushing to get through the rest of it.”
This past weekend saw Judith Allison make a big jump, finishing in 28th place to be the fourth runner in Santa Fe High’s scoring pack — just ahead of sister Rue.
It’s those types of performances that has Graham encouraged that the Demonettes can return to the state meet in November. But before that can happen comes the District 2-6A meet, in which the top three teams qualify for state. Santa Fe High was third last year, but Graham hasn’t quite gained a grasp on where his team sits in the district pecking order.
Albuquerque Eldorado appears to be the team to beat in the district and a contender at state, but La Cueva has always been a solid performer and Sandia finished ahead of Santa Fe High at the UNM meet. The good news from the weekend was that the Demonettes got to measure themselves against Clovis, which finished sixth with 138 points.
“The first thing would be to get through the district meet, and get a top-three there,” Graham said. “I definitely think if we can get to state, we can improve upon our position from last year and move up one or two spots.”
Perhaps the most encouraging sign can’t be measured in points or places. When the team finished its soggy workout, the boys and girls excitedly gathered in the Atalaya Elementary School parking lot for their “rain photo,” a tradition that dates back several years. Not even an hour of cold and rain and wind dampened team spirit as they posed for several photos that Graham took.
That can only be judged as a good sign for the rest of the season.