The cross country season officially kicked off this past weekend with the 5th annual Tim Nixon Invitational. 

 “We started in 2018. Tim Nixon was the longtime coach at Liberty High School. He started in 1979 until he passed away in 2017. He had been hosting the Liberty Invitational meet for 30 years, so he already had 10 or 12 teams and we moved locations and made it bigger to celebrate his life,” coach David Chatlos said.

Chatlos used to coach with the late Tim Nixon as his mentor in the earlier years of his career.

  “He’s all I ever knew. He was my coach as a runner for 4 years and my first 6 or 7 years as a coach he was kind of like my mentor even when we opened up I would call him with questions and concerns just to talk through anything I might have problems with,” Chatlos said

With the Tim Nixon invitational being about the life and legacy of Tim Nixon, this meet has been important to the Liberty North cross country team for as long as it has been around.

 “This meet is something that’s near and dear to Liberty North’s heart. The goal is to win the meet as a team. This season our goal is to get lots of PR’s and win as many races as possible,” runner Tori Calder said.

For the cross country team, getting PR’s is a big deal. The team trains through the summer in preparation for the season and for hopes of being better than the previous year.

“We meet a lot over the summer. We run a lot and we run often. We have kids with 200 miles all the way up to 1000 miles in preparation for the season,” Chatlos said.

Although it may seem that cross country is just running, there is also a strategy for some runners to push themselves to their limits.

“We like to race in packs. That’s the big worry that you would lose your running buddy. It becomes pretty crazy in there and easy to lose your partner,” Chatlos said.