OACs!

 Last Saturday was the Ohio Athletic Conference cross country meet. The entire week leading up to it was filled with excitement as our team prepared to host the conference meet. Each day of the week had a different dress-up theme for practice, my favorite one was “running white lies” on Thursday, everyone wore a white t-shirt with a silly lie about themselves on it. My teammate, Abby’s shirt said “I’m marrying Trent Babcock”. This is a running joke on the team because she is engaged to someone named Trent, but the Trent she’s referring to is another one of our teammates and definitely not the one she’s marrying.

    Another fun thing we did to prepare for the conference was painting pumpkins with the mascots of all the OAC schools to put next to their startline boxes. The school that hosted last year carved pumpkins for each school and we thought it would be fun to keep the tradition going. I was assigned the Otterbine pumpkin. I was a little nervous to paint this one just because their Cardinal mascot is pretty detailed and I didn’t want the proportions to be off. I ended up being pretty happy with the result, even though I painted it way too small for the size of pumpkin I chose. It was such a fun way to spend a Thursday night, chatting and painting in the Affinity Commons.

The meet itself was such a blast, everyone was really excited to race and the weather was perfect: sixty degrees and sunny. This meet marks the end of a long season for most of the team, so the post race felt very celebratory, especially since we beat our rivals, Mount Union. I’m continuing the season as an alternate for Regionals, and I can’t wait to tell you guys all about it in a couple of weeks!