Devon Jacob remembers running for the cross-country team at Kingston High School in 2013 more than just fondly.
“It was definitely my favorite sport,” he said, adding he tried several others like, “soccer, wrestling, track. But cross-country was always such fun. The night before a race, we’d all get together at someone’s house and eat a bunch of spaghetti, and sort of ‘carb up.’”
That team he ran with stays in touch to this day. Though they’ve spread out across the country, they still get together and run races.
Jacob, who is finishing medical school at the University of Texas in Galveston, along with Thomas Gill, Lucas Thompson, Simon Camponuri, Nick Boles and Ross Burk, got together again this year, this time near Tampa Bay, FL. Between Dec. 5-6 they ran a 200-mile relay race called the Ragnar Trail. The friends gathered as kind of an alternative bachelor party for Gill, who is getting married early next year.
The race is broken into legs, or loops, that are around five miles each, and each team member runs multiple legs over the two-day period, including overnight. They came in first place with a time of 17 hours, 52 minutes and five seconds.
“We ran almost every leg in some kind of holiday costume, including full Santa onesies,” said Camponuri, who lives in California and is working toward a doctorate in environmental health sciences at UC Berkeley. “I think that sense that running can be goofy and playful really started when we were in high school, but it has stayed with us all these years.”
Camponuri said he still runs about four days a week through Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. “But my wife and I have made it a tradition to run down to Eglon Beach whenever we are up in Kingston visiting family,” he said.
Jacob said Gill organized the group for the Ragnar race. “During our junior year, we were doing a running camp trip up to Canada, and we were sitting around the fire and talking about whether or not we were going to run in college, or compete and all this stuff.” Jacob said that it was Gill who said at that time, “‘I don’t care as much if I have a future in running, so long as running is in my future.’ I liked that. None of us had a future in running, but we’ve all continued to run, and it united us as friends, and it’s still a part of our lives.”
What set the runners apart for the Ragnar race was that teams were broken into two categories, regular and ultra. A regular team consisted of eight members, but Jacob’s team ran with just six, meaning that all of the members had to run more legs than usual. “We were prepping for this and all saying, ‘Oh, I’ve been sick,’ or ‘I’ve got an injury,’ or whatever,” Jacob said. “And we all were OK with just running for the fun of it, not really caring whether or not we won.”
But when the team got on the trail, it began to believe it had a chance to be on the podium. “We just didn’t think about it too much, but it’s sort of in all of our natures to really run hard when we do it. It’s the culture we learned with that cross-country spirit in high school about digging deep and working hard,” Jacob said.
That culture was about more than just running, he added. “We’d run a number of loops in high school, and then the coaches would say, ‘OK, keep going, keep going. It pushes you further than you think you can go, and so it teaches you as a high school kid that you can really push a lot harder than you thought you could. Some of that culture has led us to do things like pursue higher education, or just work that much harder for what we want.”
Jacob said that as the team gathered in Florida, memories of high school cross-country came up dozens of times.
Coach Karla Manuguid, who still coaches cross country at Kingston, said she wasn’t surprised by the team’s closeness, or its win in Florida. “We’re fortunate to have had athletes who year after year form tremendous relationships with each other and move on to do amazing things in their lives.”
Manuguid said that in her earlier years while coaching, she and a few other coaches would put on a holiday run, and a bit later, some alumni would do a night run during holidays. “I was even fortunate to join them for a couple of years,” she said.
Manuguid said she values Jacob, Camponuri, Gill and the others. “They are making a positive impact on this world, and we were so fortunate to have had them here at Kingston High School,” she said.
The team said none knew they’d won until they were on their way home, boarding flights out of Florida. Jacob said one of the team members looked up the results and saw they were first, texting the others and letting them know. “I guess we’ve just sort of taken that cross-country culture we learned, and run with it,” Jacob said.
