To anyone who has ever shouted at us:

On the morning of Saturday, August 19, 2017, we were previewing a racing course when you shouted at us, “don’t let those girls beat you” to the guys team, who we were running with. One day while we were practicing on the track you yelled at us and began to loudly rate how attractive each of us were to you. We were running an interval workout on the track that you were visiting when you yelled at your male athlete to not let us beat him. While training on the roads, you honked your car horn at us multiple times before driving away, only to make a U-turn to come back and honk at us again. By now most of us have accepted the fact that stuff like this is going to happen, however we are all fed up with it. We are tough as nails and no matter who you are, we are going to give it all we have to beat you regardless of your gender. We will fight to be better than you, male or female. We don’t train six days a week for three hours a day to impress you; we do it so that when race day comes we can race the clock and be the best athlete we can be. We don’t sweat out interval after interval so that we can beat every girl we can, we do it so that we can beat anyone we can and so we get faster. Unless you’re telling us to get out of the middle of the road, don’t you dare honk at us. Don’t flip us off as you drive by laughing with your friends, and don’t talk about how we look. We are not running for you. We are running for us.The only time you should ever yell at us while we run is to cheer us on, not to yell at the guys to not let us beat them. The only time you should ever comment on how we look is after we just got done with a muddy race and we are covered in mud and you’re saying how fierce we look. We are through with being yelled at, rated, and put down just because of our gender. We don’t care who you are, we are going to beat you. We run for us, not for you.

Sincerely,

The 2017 Girls Cross Country Team