With the regular portion of the cross country season coming to a close, our local teams are making their final adjustments to prepare for the postseason races.

Pella Christian cross country coach Jocelyn Meinders says she’s been really pleased with the amount of progress that both of her teams have made in the last several weeks, and says a real emphasis now is on putting themselves in a position to be successful.

“[We’re] just making sure they really get out and have a good start, because that is so important,” says Meinders. “Something that they’ve really had to learn is that if you get a bad start, that can put you 30 places back, right from the very beginning; so we’ve just been really working on our runners getting up to where they need to be, as well as the mental toughness that they just keep enduring all the way to the end.”

At Pella High School, head Coach Doug Cutler says that with next week’s Little Hawkeye Conference Meet serving as the final race for his JV squad, the workouts are beginning to change for the majority of his team.

“We’ll actually begin our tapering process and really talk about what that is and how we do that, so they can finish the year with the best time that they can possibly run,” says Cutler.

“The Varsity will be training through. We’ve got to keep pushing here a little bit. We train even through the conference meet so that we peak at just the right time at the end of the season.”

The Pella Christian and Pella High cross country teams are both competing at Monday’s Little Hawkeye Conference meet, which will be held in Norwalk.