Many of you will remember Mathilde Guglielmi, one of our teammates from track season last Spring.  Mathilde was known for her great attitude–and being really fast at the end of workouts and races when we decided that it was time to sprint!  Her family moved to Kansas over the summer, so unfortunately we lost a fun teammate.  However, she joined her high school cross country team and so Mathilde is still a sister runner!

I got an email from Mathilde this weekend telling me about her first cross country race in Kansas, and I thought you might be interested in hearing what your teammate is up to:

Hi Coach Flatow,
I hope you are having a great weekend !=)
So the reason why I’m emailing you is to tell you that I ran my first cross-country race this morning.  I had to wake up at 5:30 am (Which wasn’t bad at all, since I went to bed at 8:30 pm after having attended the team’s pasta party), because the buses that brought the team to the location of the race left at 6:30.  Since I’m in J.V. (There are three running levels at Northwest High, I don’t know if it’s the same thing at M.V.: C-team, J.V. and Varsity.), I raced at 9am.   As I waited, I cheered on my teammates and warmed-up (I prefer the drills that I did with the M.V. team, in my opinion they were more effective.) 
I think that I did really well, the only thing that I’m disappointed with is the finish, because I started my kick too early and then I had to slow down when I was supposed to start accelerating (and I let two people pass me).  Finally 100 meters before the finish line I told myself “Oh no Mathilde, you are not ending this race running as slow as a snail” so I sprinted and passed one or two people. But during the entire race I was in the middle of the pack (and I pretty much stayed there at the end even though I let some girls pass me) and I partnered up with a girl on my team who ran at the same pace and we both passed people at the same time. 
I really enjoy cross-country practice, my teammates and my coach (I do miss you though, because since my new team is way bigger than the M.V. track team, we don’t get the opportunity to know him well.  Also, he doesn’t give motivational speaches that are as inspirational as yours).  Like during track season we do endurance training runs (they are shorter since it gets so hot in this state.  A couple of days ago, I think that I almost fainted: I was sweating  way more than usual my head was spinning and chills started running down my body. But I’m getting used to this weather and I make sure that I get enough water), hill repeats and core exercises (we do them before running). We don;t really do any real intervals (well what we do is that we run at a mile pace for 20-30 seconds, then we jog, then we repeat the faster pace and we only do that 6-8 times).  But we have something called pool running; the coach gives us floating devices, we go in the school swimming pool and we “run” in water). In short, I really enjoy cross-country, I’m glad that I signed up for it and I want to thank you for making me love this sport.
Hope you are having a great cross-country season back at M.V.
Mathilde