Cross country a sport of pure endurance. A sport where you may push your body past the limit. Alliance has a high school and a middle school cross country team. The middle school and high school train and run together, even though they run in separate leagues. The person in charge of this team is AHS’s guidance counselor, Mr.Lanik. 

In a normal week Coach, Lanik explained that students who run cross country run about 12 to 26 miles, in 1 week. While middle school trains with high school, they do run shorter routes than the high school. While the middle school runner runs about 3-kilometers at a meet, a high schooler will run 5-kilometers. 

The cross country team has practices in both the morning and the afternoon. Runners have the choice of which practice they want to go to. Some runners can even choose to go to both. Junior runner Alec Garcia and Senior Brock Brass explained that “It’s nice going to practice in the morning because it means you have time to do other things after school and not have to worry about practice.”

Lanik went into detail about what the average week would look like for the runners. Explaining that the kids will have two hard runs a week. By a “hard run” Lanik means that the runners are being timed to see the progress being made over the season. By doing so they hope to teach the runners that at certain points you need to hit a certain mark. Normal days for the runners is “ they show up, they stretch and run a recovery run. Which is 4-5 miles.” The students will actually run in town.  

Running in cross country is nothing like track. Track is ran on a flat surface. Cross country, is running covering hills and holes that the runners have to look out for. You don’t have your own lane to run in. Everyone lines up on the starting line and when the gun goes off, the race starts.  

XC runners Alec Garcia and Brock Brass both say that cross country is not an easy sport. It’s difficult, but it’s a good sport for conditioning. Brock Brass says, “If you’re going out for XC don’t expect it to be easy, it’s going to be difficult and you’re going to face a lot of difficulties.”