Tomorrow morning, the Pomona-Pitzer men’s and women’s cross country teams will wake up while the sun is still down, the grass still wet, and the air still cool (we hope). Dressed in blue, orange, and white, the teams will head calmly over to the Wash for their first and only home meet of the season.

The Home Invitational—consisting of a men’s race at 8 a.m. and a women’s race at 8:45—will feature cross country teams from SCIAC schools such as Occidental, La Verne, and CMS (minus their top runners), as well as Division I and II squads from UC Irvine, CS San Marcos, UCLA, and CS Fullerton, among others.

The home course is quite different from the pancake-flat, hard-packed dirt of UC Riverside, where the harriers competed two weeks ago. The P-P course features loose––at times even sandy––footing, and many turns too sharp to take at full speed. Although no hills are too daunting, the course is by no means a fast one.

The men’s race begins on the south end of the soccer field, heading up a short hill to the azure track before turning west onto the dirt trails that weave through the Wash and farm. The course loops around four consecutive times before finishing on the southeastern corner of the track, allowing for maximal viewing opportunities with minimal movement, making it ideal for spectators—those ambitious enough to roll out of bed on a Saturday morning three hours before brunch opens, or those energetic, nay, crazy enough to prolong their night’s festivities until their friends’ race time.

Although the meet is not a SCIAC competition and is therefore inconsequential for league standings, it is the only time all season the runners have the opportunity to race in front of their home crowd, so it will be a particularly meaningful race for the P-P teams.Asked how he felt about racing over the same rocks, sand, and dirt that he’s sweated on during training for the last year, David Erf PO ’13 broke into quiet, emotionally-charged tears of nostalgia. Always at his side, teammate Alex Johnson PZ ’13 chimed in: “I can relate; I’ve been there before.”

Alex Bell PO ’14, having never raced at home before, had trouble articulating his excitement.

“I’m just so…It’s…Well, so but, so…Oh my gee! I can’t… [unintelligible]…Yay!” he said.

“It definitely has a special meaning for me, having run countless mornings and evenings there, along the dirt trails, down the grass hills, past the steeple pit inside the track…Each loop increasing my toughness, my steel, pushing the pace but leaving something in reserve for race day, feeling like I could do 40 loops at a time,” Tristan Roberts PO ’11 said, commenting solemnly on the significance of racing at the Wash.

The rest of the team, it seems, feels similarly: it’s just about impossible to race here without immediately thinking back to all the long, exhausting afternoons spent training in this same place. Just as you know the walk to the 7-Eleven two blocks away from home, and the adjoining Laundromat with the video game where you shoot the colored balls up one by one at a mass of other colored balls, trying (if you want to keep playing without using more leftover change from the anything-but-coconut flavored Slurpees bought moments earlier and sitting half-drunken on the bench beside the game) trying to match colored balls to colored balls, succeeding averagely—just as this walk cannot help but bring a strong feeling of nostalgia for the path you walked countless times as an elementary school youngster, a shaggy head of hair atop your head, so too will the Sagehens feel tomorrow morning.

The meet should be an exciting one for everyone, but for the athletes running at home, it surely will stand out.