Cross Country

In high school I ran cross country. Mostly because it was an easy way to stay active while hanging out with friends but also because during my first year, as crazy as it may sound, I learned to enjoy running. Running sucks. Until you have pushed your body past its normal limits and are in the middle of your "runner's high," running is exhausting and often times painful. However, cross country practices and meets are just running but you are running with your team and everybody in your group is struggling just as much as you are. So you keep going, you keep pushing to stay up with the group and at the end of a practice or a meet, everybody around you has this shared experience that brings you closer together.
As I said earlier, I joined cross country not because I was a good runner but to have fun with my friends. My second year running I managed to make varsity. No longer was I running in a mob of 20 people from each of the 10 or more teams at a meet. Instead, I had only 6 other guys running in my teams uniform and running for actual points. Every race we would start out with as much fun as we could screaming nonsensical phrases as we charged into the race because soon we'd scatter throughout the much slimmer herd of people. While running was still an individual activity, the race was a team effort; junior varsity members cheering at different points throughout the course, sharing words of encouragement if you ever managed catch somebody who would normally be ahead of you and feeling a responsibility to do well for your team and not just running for your own personal record.