Varsity Races

In high school cross country most meets have three different races. There is normally a freshman and sophomore race, a junior varsity and a varsity race depending on the meet. For the last two years I have ran the freshman and sophomore race and this year I have ran both varsity and junior varsity.

Varsity races seem to help people to run faster times than in other races. Varsity races have the fastest people and the races start out the fastest as well. Because varsity races have the fastest people and start out faster than most races, when you run a varsity race you also want to start out faster than you normally would. If you are used to running in a junior varsity race or a freshman and sophomore race and it is your first varsity race you may be surprised to find how much your time has dropped since last race. Running with faster people seems to help encourage you to want to run fast as well, especially if you are used to being in the top half of the race and now that you are on varsity you find yourself in the bottom half.

Dropping your times by running a varsity race for the first time is always good but another good thing is not having as much people in the race. Junior varsity races have unlimited entries for the race so you will see schools that have a whole bunch of people all lined up to run the same race but in varsity races you can normally only run seven varsity runners though sometimes it is ten.

My first race this year I ran in a varsity race. In this varsity race you were allowed to have ten varsity runners so I was able to run in it. It was only my first race of the year so I didn’t really have any previous times to compare my time to but I still felt like I started out the race faster then normal and was running the race faster. Since then I haven’t ran another varsity race but I am running one today. I am running on a course that I know very well and I hope to see improvement in my times.

Even though you want to run faster with the faster competition of a varsity race and look forward to improving your time it can still be important to make sure you aren’t running the first half of your race faster than you are capable because you don’t want to die out for the last half of your race.