A fight to the finish
Carly Halm, senior, races to the finish line with a broken rib.
Carly Halm, senior, struggled to breathe as she raced up the sandy hill of the crowded course. She was motion-sick from the plane ride and carsick from the drive, but Halm did not travel all the way to Oregon to quit now. She didn’t push herself through months of training to settle for second place. Halm was here to win.
Only two days before the Three Course Challenge race in Seaside, Ore., Halm and the boys’ and girls’ varsity cross country teams were practicing for the race, one of the largest with 100 schools participating. As the Oregon rain fell, Halm fell on a tree stump during practice, hitting her back against the tree and injuring her rib cage. The injury, a serious rib contusion, will take six to eight weeks to heal. But for Halm, pain was the last thing on her mind as she prepared to race the Elk Trail Hard Level in the Three Course Challenge.
During the race, Halm stuck to her strategy of sticking behind the front-runner of the race and started her kick early to gain distance over her competitors. But Halm had such a strong lead that she caught up to the boys’ race which had started five minutes before the girls’. Out of the 432 boys in the race, Halm passed 82 of them on her way to the finish line. And as the course became narrower, two feet wide in some parts, it became harder to navigate through the boys ahead of her.
“I saw her coming up the hill, and she was passing 50, 60, 70 boys, who started five minutes before her, and I remember thinking, ‘this is going to be tough’ because there were so many athletes in such a small space,” Matt Rainwater, head cross country coach, said. “I was yelling at Carly to physically push and elbow the other boys out of her way so she could get to the finish line. The other coaches thought I was crazy, but there was really no other way out.”
Step after step, boy after boy, breath after painful breath, Halm started her kick, which she had been working on all through the summer, and blocked out the pain, which she had been suffering through all day and night. And finally it was over with a first-place medal placed around her neck. Halm finished with a time of 22:57, placing 98th out of the 432 boys and with a 30-second lead over the other female runners. Halm had won her first varsity invitational race in her high school running career.
“Throughout the whole race I was just thinking, ‘I came all this way, I’m here to represent Brea, I couldn’t just stop now — not for this.’ We did so much heavy training just to prepare for Oregon that it would be a waste of an opportunity if I didn’t at least try to win,” Halm said.
When the team returned to Brea, Halm went to the hospital to have her rib x-rayed. Despite her doctor’s orders to take time off, Halm was back on her feet in two days, training at the track for the next race.
“Carly is a clutch-racer,” Rainwater said. “She’s very gutsy and she trains extremely well. When it really matters, she’ll overperform, and because of that, she always manages to exceed my expectations. In Oregon, she never talked about her ribs, which is a testament to how tough she is. I’ve seen her over these past four years mature not only as a runner, but as a person. And that’s what makes her such a strong athlete.”
