Agony and ecstasy of cross-country running

As the Euro Cross makes a welcome return, 2018 team gold medallist Verity Ockenden writes about the bumpy ride that comes with this off-road showpiece

Cross country has always held a special place in the hearts of British runners for its old school thrills and spills, bringing out the Braveheart in all of us as we daub our faces in club colours and hurl ourselves en masse into the inevitable rain.

It feels raw and instinctive; as satisfyingly brutal a way to spend a weekend as you can get. My first foray into this world of winter athletics was through school, where our tiny team would compete at the local inter-school cross-country relays.

These were always held at private schools that felt like Hogwarts and laid on lavish hot teas in their great halls afterward. At that age I could still beat some of the boys, which I relished doing, and I think the sensation of being the underdogs as guests at those schools is what also motivated us to race as hard as we did, which we were annoyingly successful at.

However, the great thing about this sport is how it humbles us all. Even after I joined Poole Runners and qualified to represent Dorset for the first time in 2008, I only finished 113th at the Inter-Counties Championships in Nottingham.

Fast forward nine years of sticking at it, and I was making my first attempt at qualifying for the European Cross Country Championships at the GB Euro trials in Sefton Park, Liverpool. I was so determined not to let anything get in the way of me making the team that I raced with a stinking cold and finished a tearful 11th.

Panic rose in my chest as I crossed the line, and I spent the next two hours in the St John Ambulance wretchedly hyperventilating until I could feel my arms again. An hour into our homeward journey I asked to stop to throw up, and promptly collapsed face-first into a pile of chips on the floor of McDonald’s. Blue-lighted to hospital, I felt even more ashamed of myself when experts concluded that all this was the result of under-fuelling and over-exerting myself on a cold day with a chest infection, topped off with hefty dose of anxiety having failed to achieve my goal.

The following season, I was intentional about going into the trials with a completely different mindset. I had frightened my mum, my friends and myself the last time, and though I still cared just as much about the result, I cared about myself too. Nerves could not be allowed to become negative and I focused on feeling relaxed and detached instead.

Strangely enough, it worked and I finished an absolutely elated second, sealing automatic qualification with my highest ever placing. It was one of those magical races that flowed so smoothly I barely remember what happened.

That kind of flow is a difficult thing to replicate, however, and although I knew I was in the form of my life, stepping up to a completely new level of competition for the European Championships was challenging.

Cross country is already a highly sensory assault for athletes with that all too familiar first squelch of clean sock into frigid mire, goose-pimpled skin chapped in the wind as the caked-on mud cracks, hot gusts of chip-fat and generators blowing on through.

Needless to say the 2018 European Championships in Tilburg, Holland, piled a whole extra layer on to that cake. Gone were the familiar parks and playing fields of home and in their place something that looked more like a skate park with its engineered undulations, packed sand and tunnel-like enclosures.

The event was held within the grounds of a safari park and, while we enjoyed stopping to catch glimpses of lions and hippos on our shake-out runs, I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by it all. Despite my decade of experience in cross country’s myriad variables and even a few races abroad thanks to the English Cross Country Association’s programme of sending a team to the Cross Internacional de Itálica where colourful bridges were built over the course and the crowds so raucous I could barely hear my own footsteps, it was a tall order not to let the occasion overtake me.

The evening prior to the race, queen of cross-country Kate Avery gave a speech that moved us all to tears and brought us so much closer together as a team. We had competed against each other with sporting ferocity for the opportunity to be at these championships and now we needed to work together to bring home the gold.

I toed the line the next morning brimming with pride and kept my eyes glued to the speeding streaks of red, white and blue as the race set off at a blistering pace and we worked to stay in contact with each other.

READ MORE: 2021 European Cross Country Champs preview

I battled a stitch for the majority of the race which every twist and turn of the rolling course aggravated, struggling to catch my breath in the fumes of a red smoke screen settling across the only flat but boggy section where someone had set off a celebratory flare.

I managed to cling on for 20th place and thanks to some masterful performances from Charlotte Arter in seventh, Melissa Courtney-Bryant in eighth, Pippa Woolven in ninth, Jess Piasecki in 10th and Kate in a valiant 15th having also suffered respiratory issues, we won team gold. I realised how much emotion I’d been holding in when we got on to the podium and I couldn’t help but cry even as the cameras zoomed in on our faces, and my sweet team-mates decided to pass our bouquet of flowers to me to make me feel better.

It was a far cry from the performance I had hoped for but the experience those championships gave me within the sport of cross country where distance running comes its closest to being a team sport, prepared me well for even bigger moments in my career in the years that followed. When an individual European Indoor medal was on the line this year, I had already learned to  handle the pressure to perform under team circumstances and I now knew I could also do it alone.

I count myself lucky to have been in the company of such supportive fellow women when I felt so utterly beaten up by something so simple as a hill in Tilburg. Cross isn’t always an enjoyable experience in the moment and the wisdom it bestows is often hard-won, but I’ll always cherish it fondly for what it has taught me.

It has shaped me into the athlete I am today, all the way from those very first days as a weedy kid in a gapingly oversized vest, safety-pinned together under the armpits.

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