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By: Zak G.
Grade 10 Jay R. is in his third year at AISG. Last school year, Jay joined Cross Country for the first time as a freshman. Since then, he has gotten much faster, over the summer of 2024, Jay made many noticeable improvements, saying that “my best time from last (2023) season and my best time from this season is a 3-minute difference.”
During the 2023 season, Jay was already a top runner on the AISG cross country team, placing fourth in internal races. However, this 2024 season, Jay moved up to second place on the team.
When asked how challenging it is to improve in cross country, grade 10 runner Jamie C. said that “it is hard [to improve] when you are already fast.” Fellow runner, grade 10 Isaac echoed similar feelings, “[improving is] so hard. I’ve spent hundreds of hours [running] months before the season [started].”
Although Jay swims and plays badminton, he chose to focus on cross country during the summer. “The first two weeks [of summer], I only ran six times a week. The next three weeks I increased my volume to seven to eight times a week… The next two weeks I ran eight times,” he said. “I ran a total of 370 kilometers over the summer.”
To make these large improvements, Jay created and committed to his own training plan for the entirety of the summer. His plan included “two long runs, two speed workouts, and two tempo/threshold runs every week.”
This routine worked for Jay, as, upon returning to cross country for the 2024 season, he became the second fastest runner on the team.
Cross country coach Jesse Ridolfo admitted that he and fellow cross country coach Alexis Cupp “were pleasantly surprised by the growth that he had.” When asked if he expected Jay to make such a large improvement over the summer, Mr. Ridolfo said that “I had no idea that Jay would make the improvement that he did the past year” and that “there was no indication that there would be such a drastic improvement.”
While some runners have been doing cross country since their first year of middle school, others, like grade 9 Leya B. and grade 10 Kenta T., joined for the first time this season. Jay joined cross country in his freshmen year at AISG and, along with runner Isaac, who has similarly dedicated hundreds of hours to cross country, is already minutes ahead of the rest of the varsity cross country team.
When asked if he thought that more people should join cross country, similarly to the rest of the cross-country team, Jay simply said “yes.” After being asked the same question, Kenta said that “not only are all the people very nice and friendly, as Mr. Bukenya (a Physical Education teacher at AISG) said, it is the best sport to start off the season. Having stamina is a basic skill for all sports and many aspects of life. Becoming good at cross country means becoming good at other sports.
Jay has two younger brothers who are also interested in athletics; however, he does not think that they will follow in his footsteps with cross country. “[my brother] mainly plays basketball and endurance is not his thing,” he said.
On a final note, according to Kenta, “I think [cross country] is one of the hardest sports to improve in. First of all, running for a long time is excruciating and makes you want to stop. However, in cross country, you cannot stop. When you start off, it is quite easy to improve… However, after hitting a wall, that rate of improvement decreases, since you must genuinely build up more stamina… Videos… or demonstrations will not help you get dramatically faster. Instead, you must run, run, and run.”
This is exactly what Jay did over the summer, and the results are clear. After improving by almost three minutes, after being asked what sport he was best at, he said that it was “cross country by a mile.”
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