Last Wednesday, over 400 students participated in the first cross country meet ever held at the school.

The Firebird scrimmage is usually held at Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, but since the school underwent construction, last year’s meet was held at Cupertino High School.

However, this year Cupertino High School is under construction, so the meet was instead held at LAHS.

Senior Jacqui Treiger, one of the girls’ team captains, thought that having the meet at home gave the cross country team a great opportunity to let students see what the runners do.

“I feel like for cross country, people don’t really get to see what we do,” Jacqui said. “But [today], people actually see what we did in cross country and it was just nice having people cheering you on.”

The course was 2.08 miles long and began at the baseball field, then wound twice around the campus. After starting at the baseball field, the runners ran straight across to the football field and ran a lap around the track. Then they ran behind the tennis courts, coming back to the track to run one lap. The course then took them back to the tennis courts, but this time the runners turned right to run down the freshmen locker corridor to the quad. They ran up the pathway of the entrance of the football field, ran around the baseball field and did one last lap around the track.

Although the new course and campus was quite different for the runners, the cross country team thought it was nothing more than a regular race. But for other schools, it may have been confusing due to more laps and loops involved.

“It was a lot easier for us knowing the campus and knowing how far to go down a corridor so it’s easier for us to pace ourselves,” Jacquie said. “But I definitely saw some people looking really confused and looking all ways [for signs and directions]. It was like, ‘which way do I go now?'”

Many tennis and field hockey players watched as the runners went by. Although these players might have gotten a little bit distracted at times, the runners themselves did not lose focus.

“You’re distracted by your own thing like being in pain, having to keep breathing and then having to keep running,” Jacqui said. “It’s mostly motivation because you don’t want to stop and walk and look really slow in front of your peers. Even at other races, there’s still the 400 athletes who are watching you. There are still things going on around you.”

The varsity boys, frosh/soph boys and JV girls all won the meet.