Cross Country is a sport of repetition and rhythm. Your feet take turns striking the ground, pushing off, then striking again. Your racecourse is a series of loops. Your weeks repeat their training schedule. And if you fail to find a rhythm while running your race pace, your mind talks you out of the discomfort, and you race poorly.
On September 5th, my cross country teammates and I opened our season at the Jersey Jam, a home race which we try to take as un-seriously as possible. We call this race a “rust-bust”—its purpose is to remember how to race, how to get into the rhythm of race day. We remember how to eat before a race, how to deal with race day nerves, how to warm up, and what it feels like to put your body on the edge.
So, on the Friday evening which concluded our first week of classes, the cross team met at our locker room to rediscover our rhythm. We did our stretching routine, pinned our racing bibs to our singlets, screwed the spikes into our shoes, jogged a few warmup miles to our racecourse, a maze of low-cut grass pathways through the high meadows. We won “the Jam” handily. Against the rest of the prominent NCAA cross country teams in New Jersey, we put 7 runners in the top 10 finishers.
The morning after a race I can never sleep in. So, early on Saturday morning, I texted my mom, who spent the night after the race in Princeton, asking to get breakfast. We grabbed a bite and walked around campus. Early morning campus was empty, belonging just to us. My mom also went to Princeton. She was also a member of Mathey College and also a member of the cross-country team, its captain in 1987. I’ve always been aware of how I followed in my mom’s footsteps, but during our walk I really internalized the resemblance of my path to hers. A rhythmic cycle of repeating events, like that of the cross country season, but on the scale of our lives. As we walked, she pointed out places which held meaning to her—old dorms, hangout spots, classrooms—and she told me of old conflicts with roommates, late nights on Prospect Ave, and eccentric professors. For each story she told, I had equivalent situations and people who have permeated my time at Princeton. It felt uncanny, how my time here has mimicked hers.
The walk reminded me of E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” in which White writes of taking his son to a lake he visited as a child. It is a short story of the “pattern of life indelible.” When White gets to the lake, he is struck by how little it has changed. He writes, “I began to sustain the illusion that [my son] was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father.” That morning walking around campus, I began to sustain the reverse of White’s illusion—that I was my mother.
I have many questions after the walk with my mom, ones of free will and intergenerational persistence, topics related to the discussion in my sociology classes. In class I’m trying to find some answers. Outside of class, I’m enjoying the rhythm cross country and college life, of setting an early alarm for a morning run, rushing to class after breakfast, winding down with friends, and resetting the alarm to do it again.