At least a couple of École Olds High School (ÉOHS) cross country team members stand a good chance of advancing beyond zones which take place today at Strathcona-Tweedsmuir School in Okotoks, according to Jana Kemmere, one of the team's four coaches.
They are Grade 10 student Liam Carrick and Grade 12 student Emily Martinez.
Carrick has shown great promise from the get-go, Kemmere says.
"Even when we started we had him running almost at the provincial average — like at the provincial meet last year, so that was pretty impressive," she says.
Martinez has the benefit of experience as well as talent.
"She's been with us in cross country for years and I think that she'll do well," Kemmere says.
In fact, 12 members of the Spartans cross country teams qualified for zones. The divisionals were held Oct. 1 in Sundre.
It will be a real challenge though.
Kemmere notes the course features hills and valleys, so that will require a lot of exertion. At the same time, the runners will have to pace themselves for a long run.
Another challenge is that the Spartans will be competing against some runners who get a lot more practice and coaching than they do.
"There's a lot of kids that we compete against who are part of club teams. So they do cross country all year and they are with one-on-one coaches and it's their sport, whereas a lot of our cross country kids, they have other sports going on and this is sort of like extra training," Kemmere says.
"We have kids who want to do cross country but then they're just pulled away and they have so much training that they just cannot keep up with all of the demand of doing the cross country and their sport as well. So we had a lot of kids at the start and then they dropped off, which was really unfortunate."
Kemmere is one of four coaches for the team. The others are Angie Dezall, Karla Pohl and Melanie Hillier.
Kemmere runs most of the practices. She and Hillier also act as pacers, monitoring team members as they run.
Dezall primarily takes care of the logistics and paperwork to get the team to various competitions. Pohl normally coaches female soccer at this time of year. But this year, that season has been moved to spring, so she volunteered to help the cross country team by assisting with clocking runners as they go by.
Kemmere notes that by and large, Olds doesn't have a lot of hills to give the team good practice at adjusting to the ups and downs of hills. However, there is a long hill near Holy Trinity Catholic School, so the team has been going out there to train.
They also gained valuable experience during the divisionals and a fun run, both of which were held during the past couple of weeks at Snake Hill in Sundre.
Coaches have also worked on conditioning and teaching runners to pace themselves.
"They get tired and then they just want to walk and then they walk until they're completely recovered," Kemmere says.
"What I really encourage them to do is as they're starting their training is to do 10 minutes of running and then one minute of walking. And if they couldn't handle that, then take it down to nine minutes of running and then two minutes of walking.
"So just to try to really eliminate the amount of time that they were walking, because they think they need to be fully recovered, but they don't.
"I think also, we had two different strategies for training. We had their distance running; so once a week we would make them run their full distance so they could mentally prepare for how long that was.
"We do the distance to mentally prepare them for, 'this is how long it's going to be,' but then we did the conditioning of running -- like trying to sprint up those hills so that they could prepare for the demand physically as well."
Kemmere is a former ÉOHS student and was a member of the school's cross country team.
She developed a love of long distance running after participating in a Mother's Day Run in Calgary, along with a few fellow students and a former teacher.
After that, she and Hillier ran some half-marathons, then a full marathon in Banff.
"Cross country is just something we feel passionate about because we feel like it's a lifelong sport for the students. So that's why we were so happy to take it on," she says.
