Northgate Girls Cross Country Makes its Mark

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By Tai Chang, Northgate parent, and Ruth Seabrook, Northgate Girls Cross Country Coach

My eyes followed the small black footprints on the carpet, wondering where they came from and where they would go. “Oh no,” I thought as I looked more closely at the carpet, “these footprints are made of ink!” My 6-year old daughter, who had a knack for finding other uses for things, had repurposed her socks into pockets, where she kept her pen, which had broken, creating the oddlooking one-footed prints before me.

Ten years later, on the eve of North Coast Sectional cross country championships, I was wondering whether she would be making any footprints at all. It was November 20, and the fires in Butte County, the most destructive in California history, had raged for almost two weeks. The devastation from that fire was and continues to be a much larger issue, but on that night I was also worried about the smoke from the fire and whether the air quality would be healthy enough to enable my daughter to run the race the next day.

Varsity girls at the Viking Invitational

It was a challenging way to think about ending the season, one that had started with so much potential for the Northgate Girls Varsity Cross Country team. The coach, Ruth Seabrook, said this of the team, “On paper this was a loaded team, one of the best girls’ teams we had fielded. Having sent one or two girls as individuals to the state meet, I finally felt we had the whole package - five seniors with multiple years of experience under their belts who had all committed to the challenge, and three juniors and a sophomore ready and able to step up if we needed them.” The team’s first race was up in Sonoma at the Viking Invitational, where they took second place, followed by third place the Artichoke Invitational and second at the Castro Valley Invitational. The Diablo Athletic League races came soon after that, with the girls running well enough to enter the League championship race tied for third. At the DAL championship race, the team didn’t quite perform up to their expectations or the coach’s, and they faded to 6th place in the League. One of the bright notes was the performance of Katrina Kohlmeyer, who placed 17th in the race and earned a League Honorable Mention medal. My own daughter had been improving steadily and had one of her better races of the season; still, she felt she could run faster and looked forward to the North Coast Sectional. The goal for the team was to peak at North Coast because the fastest teams and individual runners from there would advance to the State Championships. With that in mind, the girls’ sense that they had more to give and faster races to run propelled them to continue to train, even though it meant they had to run indoors because the smoke from the Butte fires made the air too unhealthy to run outside. (A special thanks goes to Crunch Fitness for providing the team with treadmills for 10 days.)

Northgate Varsity Girls Cross Country Team (in yellow shirts)

In the days before the North Coast Sectional, everyone was aware of the possibility that they might not be able to run because of the poor air quality. I hoped that my daughter would understand that there was more to the running than the race. As a sport, cross country is demanding and unrelentingly grueling, and it’s hard to continue doing it unless you can find meaning in it and things that you like about it. It takes a bit of repurposing – like making a nice pen holder out of a dirty sock. Just like all the other girls, my daughter had figured out that there’s so much more to cross country than running. There is the camaraderie of the team pasta feeds, long bus rides to places as far away as Southern California, and get-togethers like the beach party after the Artichoke Invitational in Half Moon Bay. There are friendships forged from hard practices, really hard practices, and really really hard practices, and supporting one another through it all. There is the focus on overall health, including Coach Ruth’s healthy diet contests (truth be told, as parents we cooked healthier meals during those contests), sleep (we felt grateful when the coach told our daughter to go home and get some sleep instead of practice), mindfulness and yoga, weight training during the offseason, listening to your body and paying attention to injury, and a regimen of daily stretching and weekly Pilates.

There’s also the beauty of the outdoors - the flat, serene canal paths populated by lazy ducks taking refuge on the banks in shady overhangs; stunning Castle Rock Park, where the runners explore legendary routes passed down from one runner to the next, such as “Lord of the Rings,” with its impossibly steep hill that you have to slide down in the winter, or “Waterfall,” where a student lost her shoe last winter and the rangers had to rescue her by golf cart, while the coach ran with one spare shoe in hand; and in our own backyard, Shell Ridge, with its dramatic hills and winding single track trails linking to the broad earth of the Mt. Diablo-Briones super highway trail. And last but not least, there is the mental strength – learning to push yourself beyond what you thought you were capable of and to endure endless hours of training, not for any external reward (as most runners don’t earn any medals), but for the sake of improvement.

The morning of November 20th, I woke up early, checked the air quality reports, saw that they were bad, and explained to my daughter that she would not be able to run the race that day. It was hard for me to tell her that, but it was even harder for her to take in. I emailed the coach, who called my daughter and told her it was a good decision. In the end, none of the girls ran that day. Their race, along with the races of many other girls and boys in Northern CA had been cancelled, just a tiny footnote in the tragedy of the Butte County fire. That day, I knew my daughter, like the other girls on the team, would be disappointed, but I knew she’d be fine with it. I could see her footprints, knew where she had been, and where she was going.