For Cross-Country Slogans, Run of the Mill Won't Do

Some shirts, Dobrzanski said, are kind of "snotty." We found some of those, too, although there can be a fine line between snotty and amusing. At the Heritage tent, freshmen Britney Cook, Vanessa Gatch, Grace Foulke, Kara Sheehan and Aiola Stoja were straddling that line with their "Our Mascara Runs Faster Than You" shirt. They liked its combination of femininity, grit and humor.

Stone Bridge sophomore Amy Walther wore a yellow shirt declaring, in her handwriting, "Running is like mouthwash . . . the more it's burning the better it's working." Walther has another shirt that says, "If I'm going to run cross-country, I'm going to start with a small country."

"I like the ones that are funny and kind of joke about cross-country," Walther said as she bided her time before her race. "It is such an individual sport, but then yet you're a team doing it. It's all about you -- you're working on your own. It's kind of a way to get you excited to run your race because you're wearing your shirt at the beginning."

Sherwood High School junior Lindsay Blank perused the Web to find sayings for her team's shirt. She and her teammates settled on "Some people follow their dreams, others hunt them down and beat them mercilessly into submission." Gee, she seemed so mild-mannered.

"Most games in other sports, you're playing one other team," Blank said. "In cross-country, at this meet, I think there are about 70 teams, and there are a lot of different shirts and you want to make your team [distinctive] -- oh, there's Sherwood, or oh, there's Walter Johnson . . . when they see your shirt. That's important."

In an informal poll, the most popular shirts at Oatlands were those worn by several Loudoun County High School runners: "We're Bringing XC Back," a takeoff on the Justin Timberlake lyric "I'm bringing sexy back" from the song "SexyBack."

"It's kind of popular right now, so we might as well do it while it's popular," senior Sarah Cunningham said, relaxing in a lawn chair outside the team tent with senior Kate Glennon.

In explaining how the T-shirts fit into the framework of cross-country, with runners having individual goals while being part of something bigger, one of the girls motioned to sophomore teammate Julie Strange. Strange placed third in the Varsity B race and posted a time about four minutes faster than what the two seniors managed in their junior-varsity event over the 3.1-mile course.

"She runs to win," Cunningham said of Strange.

"We race," Glennon chimed in with a smile, "so we can eat whatever we want."

And, maybe, to wear cool T-shirts.

Varsity Letter is a weekly column about high school sports in the Washington area.