A Beginner's Guide to Roohood and Beastdom

Just sharing some quick mandatory reading for all incoming first years on the cross country team.

You could probably fill a library with all of the Grinnell cross country team’s inside jokes and esoteric lore, and another with all the information on proper running form and racing tips, and yet another on how to be a good student-athlete. But instead of a city block’s worth of libraries that would be of interest to almost no one, we just have team knowledge, passed down through the generations. There’s no way that I include all that I know about being a good and upright Purple Roo or Beast, but I hope that this primer will serve our incoming first-years well as they discover the fascinating new world of Roohood and Beastdom!

1. Beware of dogs: I’m probably not the most qualified person to talk about this one, since I tense up at the sound of a jingling collar and can’t seem to shake the belief that a dog’s only function on earth is to solve overpopulation. Most people go through all four years of Grinnell cross country and never once get bitten, and most people who do get bitten were reportedly engaging in dumb-assery at the time and had it coming. Still, we run out in the country where there are a lot of poorly secured dogs, and even non-dumb-asses have had close calls, so take precautions. Always run in a group, since a dog’s feral instinct will only trigger once they see easy, isolated prey. Always make sure that there is at least one person slower than you in the group, since feral instinct also leads dogs to attack stragglers. Also, don’t panic (though I generally have trouble following that one).
2. Choose your own scene: From friends at other colleges, I know that a lot of sports teams have a monolithic culture, generally centering around a wild (and frankly dangerous) party scene. The great thing about Grinnell cross country, though, is that there are any number of scenes. Sure, there are parties most weekends, but we also have game-nights most weekends too, and honestly, those seem to get wilder than the parties half the time. I was scared most of my first year that I wouldn’t fit in with the team if I didn’t go to all of the parties, only to find a milder, nerdier enclave within the team that fit me better later on.
3. Pretend to know what The Minus Two Book is: At one of my first cross country parties, I heard someone say, “We’d better get The Minus Two Book out for that one!” I asked what The Minus Two Book was, and was immediately informed that I had my name down in The Minus Two Book for not knowing what The Minus Two Book was. I’m not going to spell out what exactly The Minus Two Book is (because, honestly, I’m not entirely sure), but if you don’t know, you damn well better not let on that you don’t!
4. Basically anyone can give a speech before a race: I always assumed that there was some sort of initiation process or test you had to go through. There’s not; just go into the center of the circle when the team is huddled up and start shouting something. That’s what I finally got the guts to try my second year, and it worked out fine.
5. The distinction between the men’s and women’s teams: There isn’t one. The whole gender issue is foggy from the start because we’ve had trans women on the men’s team and trans men on the women’s team. And yeah, we generally do different practices and there are other odd little quirks, like that the men’s team has a deep interest in The Digimon Movie’s soundtrack, while that interest is somewhat diminished in the women’s team. But we often go on runs together, we eat together, we party together, we survive twenty-hour bus rides to Florida together, and so on and so on. Maybe this should be obvious, but at my high school the boy’s and girl’s teams had a puritanical gender divide, so rest assured that Grinnell is much more willing to be sinful in the eye of God on this issue (as with most other things).
6. Pace yourself: It’s hard to give advice here, because there’s no one way to run right. Some first years go in thinking they need to rise to the top immediately and shoulder more mileage than they can ever complete without injuring themselves. I, like many others, assumed that there was a year-long waiting period before you were allowed to be good at running and kept my mileage and performance mid-to-low to fly under the radar (and still managed to injure myself, somehow). Just stay sane. Never get too comfortable in underachieving or overachieving. 
7. Invest in a sturdy writing chair: This doesn’t have anything to do with cross country, but the chair I was sitting on just collapsed, so it seems important. It’s my own fault for trusting some shoddy piece of crap from a Hungarian club in a burnt-out Detroit suburb. Seriously, if a guy as puny as me can destroy a chair, we all need to be on our toes.
8. Ask clarifying questions to ascertain who does and does not exist: My first year, I was always hearing about two alumni runners with silly names: Mo Facke and Salty. Mo Facke was apparently the best runner ever to grace this team (a 2:00 mile!), whereas Salty was also a pretty good runner, known for earning his nickname by berating the entire team on his prospective-student visit and making an entire electronic music album in a week with no prior experience. When I heard that Mo Facke had never actually existed, I logically assumed that the much more far-fetched character Salty could never have existed either. So, when he showed up at track conference that year, I was deeply confused as to how this non-existing person could be standing right in front of me. I still half-doubt that he exists, and this mild form of Capgras syndrome has sparked more than one existential crisis. Don’t make the same mistakes I did: find out who exists and who doesn’t.
9. Racing isn’t entirely a game of skill: Yes, practice matters in cross country, and someone who has trained hard will always beat someone who hasn’t. But, unlike the precise input-output system of track races, cross country courses always involve some element of luck. It might be so hot you get heat exhaustion, or so cold you get hypothermia, or so wet that the mud sucks away people’s shoes. Or you might have to ford a small river. Or the course might go through an active soccer field. Or you might approach railroard tracks during the race, knowing that you have a non-zero chance that a train will come through and you’ll just have to wait for it to pass before you can run the last half mile. (And yes, all of these have happened to me.) Some people are better at running in states of heat or cold or mud or train-anxiety then others, so the game is never entirely fair. But there’s always another race, and it always averages out in the end.
10. Disaster management: I had to call 911 during runs twice last year. Once I found a guy passed out on a river bank; I woke him up and asked him if he needed anything and he said that he could probably use an ambulance, if it wasn’t too much trouble. The other time I found a downed power lines in the woods and the Saratoga Springs Fire Department had to send out All-Terrain Vehicles to find and fix them. The guy on the riverbank clearly needed help, while the power lines turned out to be just telephone wires, so I accidentally wasted hundreds of dollars in taxpayer money getting the ATVs out there. But calling when there’s no real problem gets you, at worst, embarrassment, while doing nothing if there is a real problem could get someone hurt or killed. It’s best to do something.
11. Miscellaneous: Stay hydrated. Attend practice. Shoes tend to be important. Run. And so on! I’m not going to rattle off the three-library’s worth of information about all this. Besides, if I did, then you’d have nothing to learn and no reason to come here, and since we’re in pretty deep debt for that new humanities building, we really need that tuition money.