Madeleine Davison starts life as an unattached runner on Friday at the Spiked Shoe Invitational at Penn State. Madeleine gives us an insight into her preparations for her season debut and her adjustment to life as a part time student at the University of Pittsburgh!
Hi everyone!
Tomorrow marks the beginning of the end of my high school cross country career. It's a bit strange to be heading out to Penn State for the Spiked Shoe Invitational instead of down to Oakland for the Red, White and Blue Classic as I have every 2nd weekend in September for the past three years.
This year so far has been a mix of familiar and foreign, and I think this upcoming race perfectly encapsulates that experience. Although the course and the distance are new to me (my first 6k!), many of the runners are the same people I used to see at meets earlier in my career--wearing different uniforms, naturally. I'm excited for the meet and extremely grateful to the PSU coaches for making the necessary arrangements so that I could run in a race so close to home for my first meet of the year.
I said that this year has been a mixture of old and new for me; the same is true for my training and for my racing. I still do most of my workouts at North Park, and my training schedule has remained pretty much unaltered, with two workouts per week (generally one interval workout and one tempo), a long run on Saturday with my friends (including Lauren Gronbeck of Eden Christian Academy and Ava Pietryzk from North Hills), and a day off on Sunday. However, because of my class schedule, I have been working out in the mornings most days instead of in the afternoons like I did before. It's actually very liberating to be done with a hard workout by 9:30am, because it gives you the rest of the day to relax and focus on your schoolwork.
That brings me to my academic situation. As essentially a part-time student at the University of Pittsburgh, I drive about 30 minutes into Pittsburgh every morning Monday through Thursday after my workouts. On days when I don't have many classes, I typically find some comfortable spot in a library or in the Cathedral of Learning to do my work. The classes themselves are amazing! Somehow, I ended up in both Russian History to 1860 and 19th-Century Russian Literature, so it's exciting when I notice a connection between a book I'm reading for lit and the time period we're studying in history.
As a homeschooled student, I've never really been in a classroom setting since the end of 1st grade, but for some reason, the transition from online classes to physical college classes was pretty smooth and natural for me. The one thing I didn't really plan for was all the walking I would have to do to get from one building to the next between classes. At first, I probably looked a bit like Quasimodo as I lugged my overloaded backpack from one place to another, up and down all those hills-- that was before I figured out that I didn't need to bring 3 math textbooks, 2 history textbooks, 2 five-subject notebooks, and a laptop with me to every class. It's just a little weight training, right?
Well, that pretty much sums it up! This weekend is the start of a fresh new season for many of us around the state. I wish everyone in PA the best of luck this year as we chase PRs, dreams, and other runners!
