My first taste of autumn in New England came when I was four years old. My family lived for a year in Williamstown. I went to pre-school and saw my first Amherst-Williams football game. A good start.
My second was 14 years later, when I came to Amherst College and joined the freshman cross-country team. I savored the pleasure of straining my lungs and legs on hills, pathways and greenswards under radiant blue skies, breathing cool air and watching maple leaves turn red and yellow.
What a great sport. And what an assortment of terrains on which to enjoy it. You run over, around or through whatever course the home team has created, and long tradition (especially the part of it invented in Britain) says the course can be muddy, steep, rocky, wooded, watery, you name it. (I am not mentioning the extreme-sport races known as tough mudders, where you may be crawling under barbed wire while dodging crocodiles.)
No course anywhere I’ve ever heard of was like the one at Trinity College, a rival small college with its campus in the heart of Hartford, one of the region’s great old industrial cities. Nowadays, given Trinity’s urban setting, its cross-country teams run their home races on the fields and trails of Wickham Park in nearly Manchester, Connecticut. When my freshman team competed against this college, however, the cross-country course was on campus, and the obstacles were unlike anything elsewhere.
The start, for example. All two dozen of us stood in a single row atop a hill next to a flagpole, surrounded on three sides by the walls of the college’s central building. The main part of the building extended along our left. One hundred feet ahead of us, the course followed a paved driveway that passed through one wing of the building via an arch wide enough for a single car to negotiate. The starting gun launched a scramble to see who could get to the arch first.
Once through the arch, we turned right onto a sidewalk — right: a sidewalk in a cross-country race — and down a hill lined with fraternity houses. This being our opponents’ homecoming weekend, the lawns were populated by fraternity lads sipping beer, cheering for their classmates and booing my teammates and me. It was a long downhill.
At the bottom, the course made an abrupt 90-degree turn into a parking lot. The lot, bounded by a chain-link fence, was full of cars and tailgate parties. We ran just inside the fence, which defined the left side of our route while the right side was bounded by the rear ends of the parked cars, leaving a space three feet wide for us to negotiate.
The place was crowded with people who were unaware that a race was going on in the middle of their party. I watched my footing, which was how I avoided stepping into a pumpkin pie someone had set at the edge of a tailgate blanket. One of my teammates found himself having to hurdle a small child. I am not making this up.
Out of the parking lot, we turned up a hill, again on sidewalk, and then turned toward the center of campus through another arch. This arch was like the first one, except to get through it we had to run up a flight of stairs, through a hallway and out the other side. Fortunately, in these races we didn’t wear spikes.
You see why I love running.
If you run the Covered Bridge Classic 10K, you don’t actually run through a covered bridge, but you start the race right in front of it. This excellent old race takes place tomorrow in Conway’s annual Festival of the Hills. Day-of-race registration is between 8:45 and 9:40 a.m. in front of the Field Library. It is $45, cash or check only. The race starts at 10 a.m. Note that the bridge is nearly a mile, uphill, from the registration area and finish line, so getting to it is a good warm-up. The course is beautiful, and the rest of the Festival events provide plenty of post-race entertainment.
How about a course that loops through a cemetery? Register for the Halloween Monster Dash on Oct. 24 in Northfield and you can walk, run, or, if you’re a child or a family, bike this sweet-and-spooky 5K. Register in advance at https://www.active.com/northfield-ma/running/distance-running-races/the-monster-dash-5k-2026 and you may also get one of their stylish orange and black T-shirts. Race day registration is at the Northfield Town Hall. Starting time is 9 a.m.
John Stifler has taught writing in economics at UMass and has written extensively for running magazines and newspapers. He can be reached at jstifler@umass.edu.