By Mark Walters

So here it is. My senior conference championship.

I’d love to pepper this section of The Chronicle with motivation. I’d love to say a bunch of pompous things about how ready I am to run, and about how pumped I am to have one last crack at the Colonial Athletic Association’s best runners. I could go on and on about how this is it, this is what I’ve been waiting years for. I could tell you about how last year, Hofstra cross country had its best ever team finish in the CAA-5th place.

Last year, I was happy about only having to use one hand to symbolize where we finished in the conference. It was a hell of a team finish after being second-to-last, ahead of only Northeastern the previous year, my sophomore season.

I could go on and on about the goals of this team, the ups and downs we’ve been through, losing one of our top runners-Richard Schmitz-to a stress fracture in his foot. I could tell you about a runner being excused due to conduct detrimental to the team, and man, I could really get into that.

I could go into graphic detail about some of the workouts we’ve done this year, and how we’re finally bringing together all we’ve worked for this fall. Man, I could really rant about that.

I could tell you all about how I’ve never had a good conference race. Not since we went down to Wilmington, North Carolina my freshman year for my first CAA championship. Not in Delaware as a sophomore-I thought that was my year-and not even after bringing my high school spikes handed down to me from my high school coach out of my closet, dusting them off, and trying to bring back the magic last year at Bethpage, our own course.

I’ve had good regional races, but it’s never been there at conferences, the most important race of the season. For whatever reason, I’ve never had that stuff-whatever it may be-on the last weekend of October. I could go on and on about that, but for once, the CAA championship race is the first weekend in November, so it’s different this year.

With a new coach, new freshman, and the loss of several key seniors, a lot of things have been different. The attitude, the morale, and man, I could write a whole novel about that. Yeah, I could go on and on. On and on I could go.

Of course, many of you probably think I’m contradicting my own words by saying how I could go on and on, all the while going on and on, but I don’t think that’s the case. No, I’m not going on and on. To merely write 1000 words each week about this team and this season; it’s an understatement to say you’ve been exposed to a very abbreviated version of what goes on between the first week of preseason back in late August to the week before Thanksgiving. From Eisenhower Park, and Mitchell Field to the streets of Hempstead, Uniondale and Garden City, all the way out to Sunken Meadow State Park in Suffolk County, I can’t even begin to capture on these pages what goes through the hearts and minds of the 10 other men I so graciously share my time with. Family time, you wouldn’t understand.

Yeah, I could go on and on about it, but what matters is that we do it, and come 11 a.m. this Saturday morning down in Virginia, it has to get done. So excuse me, but we have a race to run.

Mark Walters is a senior staff writer for The Chronicle. He is the senior captain of the Hofstra men’s cross country team. This is his memoir of his final season wearing the blue, white, and yellow.