The Middle Mile

My heart is racing, my legs are shaking and I’ve lost all concept of time and tempo. The adrenaline rush of the start, the crack of the gun, the manic opening cheers, have all dulled to a mild ringing in my ears as I leave the first mile mark in my wake and face up to the reality of two more grueling miles before I can collapse on the ground in relief. I’m racing the most important three splits of the season and the UNC Asheville women’s team is less than 15 minutes away from securing our best performance in 21 years at the conference championships. But nobody knows it yet. The finish line isn’t even in focus.

Give up, you know you want to. This isn’t worth the pain. Stop now and it will all be over, I promise.  

“Fast cross country racing is kind of a game of attrition. The first 400 meters you’ve already started to produce some lactic acid and usually by that mile point you’re starting to get pretty tired. Then it’s like okay, can I now start to dig in mentally to focus on racing the people around me?” said Adam Puett, head cross country coach at UNC Asheville, upon reflection of the race. 

The last six minutes have been a blur of spikes and jerseys jostling for a strong start. Desperate, blind faith can carry you off the line, but it’s only a matter of time before the true fitness of your legs starts to creep back in slowly, first as a whisper in your calf muscles until it starts to scream bloody murder in your brain. This is the turning point. The make or break. The middle mile. Where you either chose to walk over hot coals without socks, or you step off safely and regret it for the rest of your career. 

This is a bad idea. We can’t keep running at this pace. It’s all coming crashing down. We knew this would happen, didn’t we?

“It’s an idealized version of the race, the first mile. Your fitness hasn’t caught up with you yet and other racers haven’t foiled your plans yet either. The middle mile is a different story,” said Madeline Wittschen, graduated senior on the UNCA women’s cross country team. 

The middle mile of the 2025 Big South cross country course at the Longwood golf course begins with a hill. A hill steep enough to shatter your confidence in weight training, but flat enough to glare straight into the eyes of any spectator willing to meet your oxygen-starved stare. 

I choose Madeline, a former teammate who knows the exact floorplan of the crypt of negative thoughts my caffeinated racing brain has crawled into. She’s been here before and it’s too dark of a place to forget. 

This is too fast. People will forgive you if you stop now. We could fake an injury. We could never race again. Don’t say you’re not tempted. 

“I remember looking at you and seeing your face and seeing how much you were hurting,” Madeline said. “Then I remember screaming incoherently: 

YOU’VE GOT TO WANT IT,

YOU’VE GOT TO KEEP GOING,

STAY IN IT.”

I felt myself shift into a gear I’d been wrestling with my internal gearbox to unstick. The friction between my feet and the grass eased up just enough for me to surge forward, cresting the hill, arms forcefully pumping, mind chewing on those quick words of belief and spitting out the negative self-talk which had settled into my cadence intrusively. Two more turns and I’m into the final mile. This is the worst of it. This is what we train for. This is for the team. 

We can do this. We’ve been here before and we always get through it. You do want it. You do.

“When I saw you pushing through I could tell you were saying to yourself ‘no, I’m a good runner. I deserve to be up front. It’s going to really hurt, but I’m strong’ and I saw that and was like, they’re going to do it today. Today is going to be the day,” Madeline said.

It’s easy to look back and talk about the excitement of the start, or the painfully graceful final few strides across the line. But we forget about the in-between, the all-too-familiar wrestle with head and heart rate, the brick wall, so to speak, that feels reinforced with concrete cynicism. Those six or so minutes of lactic purgatory, where you truly discover what type of runner you are. It’s lacerating and exhilarating and inevitable. And I wouldn’t change a single second of it. 

“It was really that middle mile that made me feel like we got it. It was a big transformational time and I feel like I saw a lot of maturity in the girls I’d seen race before,” Madeline said. “This was the day we’ve been fighting for and I was very proud and very excited to see it.”