Ethan Cannon

One thing I like about XC is that even though this race was not a "PR" (not in the sense of actual time, I don't really care about time in XC, but in the sense that it obviously wasn't my best performance ever getting 109th here when I've gotten 83rd at nationals before), but I can still take away something positive, which is that I helped my team (I was our fourth man) take a really good step in the right direction by getting 15th place and beating 5 ranked teams. That just doesn't happen in track. I still feel like I and we have a long way to go, and I hope to make up that difference ASAP so we can go to nationals together because we are running out of real estate to do so. Next up is conference, we'll see what we can do there. Btw about the race, thankfully I felt a lot more relaxed going into it. I always do better when I am relaxed. Always. I went out WAY in the back- like 20 meters off the back of the "pack". It was just such a hard start on such a soft course. It doesn't look like a hard course (or should I say "difficult") but the soft ground with lots of divets makes it really burn very easily. I went out way in back and even after narrowly avoiding a huge pileup of like 25 dudes that was sad but fun to watch early on, I was still in only 191st at 2K. Felt controlled until 6K when I started feeling burnt. Gotta remember how much each second counts- by score, Michigan wrecked us 285 to 413. But it would have only taken our 2-5 going 15 seconds faster each to beat them!