Cross country: a parable

A full page article in the NY Times celebrates Van Cortlandt Park; bane and Mecca of generations of cross-country runners. I found the sentences I always look for; the ones that resonate for me. Having three children all of whom have run and prospered from cross-country, I find these words sustaining:

Cross-country is like a Broadway performance: a mix of exhaustion and exhilaration. Runners absorb elbows, bang shoulders, incur spike wounds. But anyone who outkicks an opponent on the long homestretch finishes battle-tested and content.

The best feeling of all is less understood — that by taking on the arduous challenge of Van Cortlandt you are granted some hard-to-define blessing; the work itself is a sacrament. As a youth, you are doing something right because it is necessary. To dig deep on the hills, to be unafraid: it matters not that you are fast or slow. Perhaps Bob Dylan was right that “the slow one now will later be fast.”