Spider Salad

Two weeks ago I had a crazy weekend. I had four hours of free time, and that was spent doing productive things. On Saturday I got up at 6am because I had to go to the cross country league meet, then I went to help out at the haunted house for eight hours, then I had to go to the team sleepover. On Sunday I picked up hair dye, applied to college and dyed hair with the cross country team. I did not get a lot of sleep.

But back to the cross country meet, we ran at 9:30, and I ran horribly, but we still won the meet. We were league champions again, so that’s the sixth year in a row.

And honestly, that’s really impressive. We have been undefeated league champions for six years. Our team has not lost a meet in six years. I have never lost a meet in my four years of running in high school. That’s insane! I can’t wrap my head around it. The tragedy is, that I really don’t think we deserve to have won. In the years prior, we were always so excited. We were proud, we were happy, and our energy when we won would be super high. We wanted to win. And we still do, but now we expect to win. Other teams want to beat us more than we wanted to win. All I personally felt after leading my team to their sixth victory was relief. I should have been pumped, but instead all I felt was a wave of relief. I don’t know what would have happened if we had lost, but it would not have been pretty.

I think our team is just really tired. We have been working toward this since the end of June. I held captains practices nearly every day, we followed the schedule that our coach sent us to the letter, and we went to running camp. Running camp was honestly one of the best weeks of my life, and definitely the highlight of my summer. (That sounds sad, and non-runners would hate it, but its a week away from home where you get to hang out with your team for a whole week. It’s so fun!) But by now we expect to be able to preform better than we have been, and it feels like all of our work was for nothing. We are giving up. We need a break. And we can’t have one because the state qualifier meet is in two weeks and we need to be ready for it. We’ve taken second at this meet (in division 1) for the last 5 years. The top three teams in the division go to states, and we want to make it 6 years. In order to do that we all need to have a good day. We take it one meet at a time, but there’s never any time to celebrate your achievements after they happen. The cycle is wearing on us.

After the league meet, I had to go help out at the haunted house because I’m a part of student council. Maddie Prechtl and I ditched the first hour of setup though. We went to get smoothies because Maddie was really upset with her race. Then we took a nap in my car because we were tired. We worked at the haunted house from 1pm to 8pm. It was exhausting and we weren’t allowed to leave, so we sat under a blanket hiding in the corner of the tennis courts eating food we stole from concessions.

After that, we both went to the team sleepover at Hannah Webb’s house. That was super fun, but we didn’t go to bed until 5am. We had a lot of sugar and caffeine. The energy at the sleepover was low though. We were all very tired and disappointed in our performances, but as long as we didn’t talk running it was a really fun time.

The next morning I went to pick up hair dye. Since we won leagues we have to dye our hair because we have a chance at making states.

When I finally got home it was 1pm on Sunday. I had 5 and a half hours before I had to be at Kimmie Harding’s house to dye hair.

In that 5 hours, I had to do my math homework, finish my scrapbook, eat dinner, and apply to college.

I have to add that I thought I would feel different after applying to college. I thought I would be a little less stressed because at this point I can’t do anything else. They either accept me or they don’t. But for some reason, I’m more stressed than I was, so that’s fun. Can’t wait to hear back in December. Also I did the whole thing on naviance where I say “submitted my application” but guidance hasn’t sent my letters and such so that’s also fun.

The hair dying turned out really well, and we have extra dye in case we need to re-do it.

We will have to re-do it actually. My hair is pale blue.