I will admit that although I ran in HS, having started a little earlier/younger, I had no school spirit and largely shunned school sports. I got talked into XC sophmore year by a guy I ran with, but I don't think it worked like it does now for many schools and certainly colleges. The season went from early September to late October. 8 weeks if I round up. Outside of that, the XC coach didn't really exist and had absolutely no contact with me or anyone else at school.
The track team had a completely different coach (they worked at different schools during the day and almost certainly didn't know each other) and different people on the team too. I never participated, but stumbled on a track practice once and knew 1 guy. So very little (1-2 people) overlap with the cross team. Even if you did both, you were on your own the other 8 months or so a year. No built-in crowd or scene awaited you. You presumably already had a gang of friends. I know I did.
Given this lack of a year-round program with a tight-knit group of friends, my first introduction to what everybody is referring to came from RWTB. I had no interest in nor knowledge of NCAA running when I was 18 - I have always raced primarily on the roads - and what was happening in that book resembled my high school experience not at all. However, it opened my eyes to what a lot of you went through in high school and beyond. Although I was never really interested in the 'team' aspect of running, I wondered what it would have been like......
After reading this essay, however, I now know I would have hated if. I was definitely not friends with the crowd this guy describes. I think hanging out with the misfits and losers on his team(s) would have been depressing. If I didn't have a vision of running on my own without a school involved (in real life, I did of course) I would not have run. I can't even imagine going to the D&D club with the intention of meeting the least interesting, charismatic, fun, and popular kids on campus - then making them my only friends.
It seems strange to me that some - or perhaps most - of you associate the great sport of distance running with a social experience similar to that descibed. Maybe from age 24 onward you experience the sport like I did and still do, but this geek squad defined it up until then. I admittedly wondered, in middle age, what it would have been like to have run collegiately. I didn't realize until just now that I hadn't missed much!