Cross country team a small, tight knit family

The Saints cross country team is at its halfway point on the season. The men and women aren’t off to a great start, but they weren’t expecting one: Their main goal is to improve as runners, and not to win events.

This is a very young team filled with mainly freshmen, with the exception of sophomore Jon Morrell-Salter. The women’s runners are: Whitney Hanson, Hannah Lewis, Stephanie Lite, Leah Russell, Sarah Sjaastad and Erica Velkamp. The men’s runners are: Erick Daniels, Jacob Fry, Aaron Pettengill, Jared Pohll, Terek Thornburg and Morrell-Salter.

The Saints aren’t a large team, but they’re okay with that. Russell likes that they’re a small team opposed to the MHCC track and field team, which has a lot of athletes. She said, “We’re like a family. We complain together but we also grow together.”

The Saints are indeed putting in a ton of work, running somewhere around 40 miles a week in practice. When the group started the season, Pohll said, she and the others were running closer to 25 miles a week. Coach Jim Satterfield has been a huge reason why they’ve seen major improvement, individually, since the beginning of the season, starting them with a lesser amount of miles and building them up as time goes by.

Here’s what Satterfield had to say about his team: “They all have a love for it… Right now we’re not loaded with a ton of runners who will run in the front of the pack; we’ve had those teams in the last few years.

“This year we have a lot of people who are fairly new or raw to the sport. This is a sport that takes 10 years to get really good,” he continued.  Comparing cross country to baseball, he said, “show me a kid who’s playing college baseball that didn’t play Little League.

“There aren’t, at least none that I’ve ever heard of. It takes 10 years to really develop your heart and lungs so you can be really close to your potential as a runner,” Satterfield said. Most of the Saints team “are really in those beginning years and you can’t make them run 10 miles a day. They can’t handle it, you start them at five and work them up to six and seven miles a day.”

While their coach loves to see major individual improvement over time, he hasn’t been the only one to notice. Pohll and Russell have both felt the differences. Russell said her biggest struggle has been better breathing, which she feels is under control. Pohll said this season has really got him in shape. He has seen a 40-second improvement in his average mile time from the Saints’ first event, to their latest.

Fry sliced 21 seconds off his average mile time, and Russell saw a 34-second difference.

In cross country, the men’s competitors run an 8-kilometer course – about 5 miles. Women run a 5K course – about 3 miles. So, improving per-mile individual times can make a huge difference.

Fry, the top MHCC runner, said he’s proud of how the team has come together and worked on getting better.

“Right now it’s not about winning meets, it’s about everyone giving their best and seeing how far we can stretch our abilities,” Fry said.

That’s exactly what Satterfield wants out of his runners. He’s more focused on them improving, and clearly that mentality has been passed down to his runners.

The next time supporters can see the Saints compete is Saturday at the Wes Cook–George Fox Invitational, to be run at Willamette Mission State Park, west of Brooks (near Salem).

They should remember when they’re out there that cross country is  so much more than just a three-to-five mile run. These guys and girls are competing, and not just against one another. They’re competing against the mental battle they face out there alone. They don’t get to go to the bench and talk, or grab three minutes of rest as their legs begin to soar and their heart pumps like there’s no tomorrow. They face those battles alone on the course, a tremendous life lesson itself.

It’s like Satterfield says: “If cross country was easy, everyone would compete.”